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,
#201
James T. Richardson
#7408
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
James T. Richardson is Emeritus Foundation Professor of Sociology and Judicial Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno. He is a sociologist with legal training, who has edited and co-edited over a dozen books and has authored more than 300 scholarly journal articles and book chapters. Areas in which he is specialized include the sociology of religion, the sociology of law, religion and human rights, social control of religions, social psychology of law, social and behavioral science evidence, and treatment of Muslims in courts. Richardson has been an outstanding figure in American sociology...
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Bernard Lahire
#23950
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Bernard Lahire is a French sociologist and author who serves as a professor of sociology at the ENSL graduate school in Lyon. Lahire is also a member of the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies. By the late 2000s, Lahire rose to prominence as one of the country's most eminent living sociologists.
Go to Profile#203
Michael T. Hannan
#18375
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Michael Thomas Hannan is an American sociologist, and professor of management at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, known for his seminal work in the field of organizational ecology. Biography Hannan received his B.A. at the College of the Holy Cross in 1965, his M.A. at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in 1968, where he also obtained his Ph.D in sociology in 1970.
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Nikolas Rose
#3591
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Nikolas Rose is a British sociologist and social theorist. He is Distinguished Honorary Professor at the Research School of Social Sciences, in the College of Arts and Social Sciences at the Australian National University and Honorary Professor at the Institute of Advanced Studies at University College London. From January 2012 to until his retirement in April 2021 he was Professor of Sociology in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at King's College London, having joined King's to found this new Department. He was the Co-Founder and Co-Director of King's ESRC Centre for Society and Mental Health.
Go to Profile#205
Richard Green
#10749
Overall Influence
1936 - 2019 (83 years)
Richard Green was an American-British sexologist, psychiatrist, lawyer, and author known for his research on homosexuality and transsexualism, specifically gender identity disorder in children. He is known for his behaviorism experiment in which he attempted to prevent male homosexuality and transsexuality by extinguishing feminine behavior in young boys. He later came to favor biological explanations for male homosexuality.
Go to Profile#206
Karen Barad
#3285
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Karen Michelle Barad is an American feminist theorist and physicist, known particularly for their theory of agential realism. Biography They are currently Professor of Feminist Studies, Philosophy, and History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. They are the author of Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Their research topics include feminist theory, physics, twentieth-century continental philosophy, epistemology, ontology, philosophy of physics, cultural studies of science, and feminist science studies.
Go to Profile#207
Jutta Allmendinger
#11319
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Jutta Allmendinger is a German sociologist who has been serving as the president of the WZB Berlin Social Science Center and a professor of educational sociology and labor market research at Humboldt University since 2007. She is also a senior fellow at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University.
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Ronald Stuart Burt
#16953
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Ronald Stuart Burt is an American sociologist. He is the Charles M. Harper Leadership Professor of Sociology and Strategy at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and a Distinguished Professor at Bocconi University. He is most notable for his research and writing on social networks and social capital, particularly the concept of structural holes in a social network.
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Laurent Thévenot
#15455
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
#210
Jessie Bernard
#7307
Overall Influence
1903 - 1996 (93 years)
Jessie Shirley Bernard was an American sociologist and noted feminist scholar. She was a persistent forerunner of feminist thought in American sociology and her life's work is characterized as extraordinarily productive spanning several intellectual and political eras. Bernard studied and wrote about women's lives since the late 1930s and her contributions to social sciences and feminist theory regarding women, sex, marriage, and the interaction with the family and community are well noted. She has garnered numerous honors in her career and has several awards named after her, such as the Jessie Bernard Award.
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Elihu Katz
#4080
Overall Influence
1926 - 2021 (95 years)
Elihu Katz was an American-Israeli sociologist and communication scientist whose expertise was uses and gratifications theory. He authored over 20 books and 175 articles and book chapters during his lifetime and is acknowledged as one of "the founding fathers of regular television broadcasts in Israel."
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Ronald Breiger
#20780
Overall Influence
Ronald Breiger is an American sociologist and a Regents Professor, a professor of sociology and government and public policy, an affiliate of the interdisciplinary graduate program in statistics and data science, and an affiliate of the interdisciplinary graduate program in applied mathematics at the University of Arizona. Prior to coming to Arizona he served on the faculties of Harvard University and Cornell University . He is well cited in the fields of social networks, social stratification, mathematical sociology, organizational sociology and cultural sociology and, with Linton Freeman, edited the influential academic journal Social Networks from 1998 to 2006.
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Joan Acker
#18217
Overall Influence
1924 - 2016 (92 years)
Joan Elise Robinson Acker was an American sociologist, researcher, writer and educator. She joined the University of Oregon faculty in 1967. Acker is considered one of the leading analysts regarding gender and class within the second wave of feminism.
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Albert K. Cohen
#5610
Overall Influence
1918 - 2014 (96 years)
Albert Kircidel Cohen was a prominent American criminologist. He is known for his Subcultural Theory of delinquent urban gangs, including his influential book Delinquent Boys: Culture of the Gang. He has served as Vice President of the American Society of Criminology from 1984–1985 and in 1993 he received the society's Edwin H. Sutherland award.
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Teresa de Lauretis
#5390
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Teresa de Lauretis is an Italian author and Distinguished Professor Emerita of the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her areas of interest include semiotics, psychoanalysis, film theory, literary theory, feminism, women's studies, lesbian- and queer studies. She has also written on science fiction. Fluent in English and Italian, she writes in both languages. Additionally, her work has been translated into sixteen other languages.
Go to Profile#216
Erwin J. Haeberle
#17714
Overall Influence
1936 - 2021 (85 years)
Erwin J. Haeberle was a German social scientist and sexologist. Biography Haeberle was born on 30 March 1936 in Dortmund, Germany and died in Freiburg, Germany. From 1956 to 1963 he studied drama, German, English literature, and French literature at the University of Cologne, University of Freiburg, University of Glasgow, and University of Heidelberg. He received a M.A. in 1964 from Cornell and a Ph.D. in 1966 from Heidelberg. Haeberle was a postdoctoral fellow at Yale and U.C. Berkeley from 1966–1972. He earned an Ed. D. in sexology from the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in 1977, where he was a professor from 1977–1988.
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Thomas Bottomore
#11615
Overall Influence
1920 - 1992 (72 years)
Thomas Burton Bottomore was a British Marxist sociologist. Bottomore was Secretary of the International Sociological Association from 1953 to 1959. He was the eighth president of ISA . He was a prolific editor and translator of Marxist works, notably his collections published in 1963: Marx's Early Writings and Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy.
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Shelley Correll
#18479
Overall Influence
Shelley Joyce Correll is an American sociologist. She is the Michelle Mercer and Bruce Golden Family Professor of Women’s Leadership Director at Stanford University. Early life and education Correll was born and raised in Houston, Texas, to a police officer father and stay-at-home mother, neither of whom went to college. Growing up, her family was big fans of the Houston Astros and she saw games played in the Astrodome. Upon earning her Bachelor of Arts degree from Texas A&M University, Correll became a high school chemistry teacher while also interning at Dow Chemical Company and taking master’s levels classes in sociology at the University of Houston.
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David Lockwood
#13444
Overall Influence
1929 - 2014 (85 years)
David Lockwood was a British sociologist. Early life Lockwood was born on 9 April 1929 in Holmfirth, England, and was the youngest child in his working-class family. His father, Herbert, was a dyer and then retrained as a cobbler after being wounded during the First World War and he died when Lockwood was 10. His mother, Edith, was a cleaner. He served in the Army Intelligence Corps from 1947 to 1949.
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Michael Schudson
#2685
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Michael S. Schudson is professor of journalism in the graduate school of journalism of Columbia University and adjunct professor in the department of sociology. He is professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. He is an expert in the fields such as journalism history, media sociology, political communication, and public culture.
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Eva Illouz
#10438
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Eva Illouz is a professor of sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris. She was the first woman president of Bezalel Academy of Art and Design.
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Matthew Desmond
#6652
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Matthew Desmond is a sociologist and the Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology at Princeton University, where he is also the principal investigator of the Eviction Lab. Desmond was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2022.
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Nils Christie
#6867
Overall Influence
1928 - 2015 (87 years)
Nils Christie was a Norwegian sociologist and criminologist. He was a professor of criminology at the Faculty of Law, University of Oslo. Personal life Christie was born in Oslo on 24 February 1928, a son of Ragnvald Christie and Ruth Hellum. He married Vigdis Margit Moe in 1951, and was later married to .
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Martin Albrow
#17670
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Martin Albrow is a British sociologist, noted for his works on globalization, the theory of the global age and global civil society. He was appointed in 1963 as the first full-time sociologist at Reading University, and subsequently worked at University College Cardiff, where he was Head of Department, and at Roehampton University. He has also held visiting or guest positions at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, the London School of Economics, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, the Beijing Foreign Studies University, and the University of Bonn.
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Jonathan R. Cole
#9118
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Jonathan R. Cole , is an American sociologist, John Mitchell Mason Professor of the University at Columbia University. He is best known for his scholarly work developing the sociology of science and his work on science policy. From 1989 to 2003 he was Columbia’s chief academic officer – its Provost and Dean of Faculties.
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Michèle Lamont
#25587
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
#227
Howard Winant
#7088
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Howard Winant is an American sociologist and race theorist. Winant is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Winant is best known for developing the theory of racial formation along with Michael Omi. Winant's research and teachings revolve around race and racism, comparative historical sociology, political sociology, social theory, and human rights.
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Nandini Sundar
#4325
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Nandini Sundar is an Indian professor of sociology at the Delhi School of Economics whose research interests include political sociology, law, and inequality. She is a recipient of the Infosys Prize for Social Sciences in 2010. She was also awarded the Ester Boserup Prize for Development Research in 2016 and the Malcolm Adiseshiah Award for Distinguished Contributions to Development Studies in 2017.
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Lloyd Ohlin
#6193
Overall Influence
1918 - 2008 (90 years)
Lloyd Edgar Ohlin was an American sociologist and criminologist who taught at Harvard Law School, Columbia University, and the University of Chicago over his career where he studied the causes and effects of crime and punishment, especially as it related to youthful offenders and delinquents.
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Guillermina Jasso
#18092
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Guillermina Jasso is a sociologist who has significantly contributed to the demography of immigration to America. Jasso is currently the Silver professor of Sociology at New York University where she was formerly Chair of the Department of Sociology. Jasso's research addresses distributive justice, inequality and stratification, mathematical methods for theoretical analysis, and survey methods for empirical analysis.
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William H. Sewell
#22775
Overall Influence
1909 - 2001 (92 years)
William Hamilton Sewell was a United States sociologist and the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin–Madison during the 1967–1968 school year. He is the father of William H. Sewell Jr. Biography Sewell was born on November 27, 1909, in Perrinton, Michigan. He attended Michigan State University, where he received his BA in 1933 and his MA in 1934, both in sociology. He then attended the University of Minnesota, where he received his Ph.D. in sociology in 1939 with a dissertation supervised by F. Stuart Chapin. He briefly taught at Michigan State and Oklahoma State before he became a profe...
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Ray Oldenburg
#12370
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Ray Oldenburg was an American urban sociologist who is known for writing about the importance of informal public gathering places for a functioning civil society, democracy, and civic engagement. He coined the term "third place" and is the author of The Great Good Place and the 2001 Celebrating The Third Place.
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Asef Bayat
#3343
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Asef Bayat is an Iranian-American scholar. He is currently the Catherine and Bruce Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies, Sociology, and Middle Eastern studies at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was previously a Professor of Sociology and Middle Eastern studies and held the Chair of Society and Culture of the Modern Middle East at Leiden University, The Netherlands. He served as Academic Director of the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World and ISIM Chair of Islam and the Modern World at Leiden University .
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Douglas Harper
#20138
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Douglas A. Harper is an American sociologist and photographer. He is the holder of the Rev. Joseph A. Lauritis, C.S.Sp. Endowed Chair in Teaching with Technology at Duquesne University, a chair funded by a grant from the Mellon Foundation.
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Alexander Deichsel
#27297
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Alexander Deichsel is a German sociologist and professor at the University of Hamburg . Deichsel completed his abitur at the Christianeum Hamburg. He is the founder of sociology of brand and co-editor of the Complete Works of Ferdinand Tönnies.
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Steven Shapin
#6327
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Steven Shapin is an American historian and sociologist of science. He is the Franklin L. Ford Research Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. He is considered one of the earliest scholars on the sociology of scientific knowledge, and is credited with creating new approaches. He has won many awards, including the 2014 George Sarton Medal of the History of Science Society for career contributions to the field.
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Stanley Cohen
#5011
Overall Influence
1942 - 2013 (71 years)
Stanley Cohen was a sociologist and criminologist, Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics, known for breaking academic ground on "emotional management", including the mismanagement of emotions in the form of sentimentality, overreaction, and emotional denial. He had a lifelong concern with human rights violations, first growing up in South Africa, later studying imprisonment in England and finally in Palestine. He founded the Centre for the Study of Human Rights at the London School of Economics.
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Raymond Boudon
#8877
Overall Influence
1934 - 2013 (79 years)
Raymond Boudon was a sociologist, philosopher and Professor in the Paris-Sorbonne University. Career With Alain Touraine, Michel Crozier and Pierre Bourdieu, Raymond Boudon is one of the leading French sociologists of the last quarter of the 20th century. He is known for his research on social mobility and inequality of opportunities as well as for his defense of methodological individualism.
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Dalton Conley
#15759
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Dalton Clark Conley is an American sociologist. Conley is a professor at Princeton University and has written eight books, including a memoir and a sociology textbook. Education Conley attended Stuyvesant High School. He subsequently graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a B.A. in humanities and from Columbia University with an M.P.A. in public policy and a Ph.D. in sociology. He also holds an M.S. and Ph.D. in biology from NYU.
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Donald Angus MacKenzie
#8927
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
#241
Michael Messner
#11019
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Michael Alan Messner is an American sociologist. His main areas of research are gender and the sociology of sports. He is the author of several books, he gives public speeches and teaches on issues of gender-based violence, the lives of men and boys, and gender and sports.
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Barry Popkin
#33033
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Barry Michael Popkin is an American nutrition and obesity researcher at the Carolina Population Center and the W.R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of Nutrition at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Public Health, where he is the director of the Global Food Research Program. He developed the concept of "nutrition transition". He is the author of over 650 journal articles and a book, The World is Fat, translated into a dozen languages.
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Geoffroy de Lagasnerie
#8635
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (43 years)
Geoffroy de Lagasnerie is a French far-left philosopher and sociologist. He is the author of several books, articles and lectures pertaining to social and political philosophy, epistemology and critical theory, and the sociology of culture and intellectual life; with a particular interest in the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault.
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Fred L. Block
#7837
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Fred L. Block is an American sociologist, and Research Professor of Sociology at UC Davis. Block is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading economic and political sociologists. His interests are wide ranging. He has been noted as an influential follower of Karl Polanyi.
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David Altheide
#20242
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
David L. Altheide is an American sociologist. He taught for thirty-seven years at Arizona State University and is Regents' Professor Emeritus of the School of Justice and Social Inquiry there. Educational background David Altheide received his B.A. in 1967 from Central Washington State College, with a distinction in Sociology and a minor in Philosophy. After receiving his bachelor's degree, he was awarded a Title IV National Defense Education Act Fellowship to attend the University of Washington, where he graduated in 1969 with an M.A. in Sociology. Altheide continued his graduate studies ...
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Martina Löw
#23953
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Martina Löw is a German sociologist. Vita Martina Löw, former president of the German Sociological Association; Professor of sociology/sociology of architecture and planning at Technical University Berlin; Director of Collaborative Research Centre SFB 1265 “Re-Figuration of Spaces” in Berlin. In January 2023 the ranking website Academic Influence ranked her #3 of "Influential Women in Sociology from the Last 10 Years."
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Michael Hviid Jacobsen
#18397
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Michael Hviid Jacobsen is a Danish professor of sociology. Since 1997 he has been employed at Aalborg University, acting from 2009 as a professor at the Department of Sociology and Social Work. He is a frequent lecturer and often appears in the media as an expert within a wide range of topics, particularly in relation to our changing culture of death and criminal issues.
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Sudhir Venkatesh
#7597
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh is an American sociologist and urban ethnographer. He is William B. Ransford Professor of Sociology & African-American Studies at Columbia University, a position he has held since 1999. In his work, Venkatesh has studied gangs and underground economies, public housing, advertising and technology. As of 2018, he is the Director of Signal: The Tech & Society Lab at Columbia University.
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Munesuke Mita
#16565
Overall Influence
1937 - 2022 (85 years)
Munesuke Mita was one of the most famous sociologists in Japan. Mita has studied about modern society at University of Tokyo and influenced many young sociologists such as Masachi Ohsawa, Shunya Yoshimi, Atsushi Miura and Shinji Miyadai.
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Martyn Hammersley
#14286
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Martyn Hammersley is a British sociologist whose main publications cover social research methodology and philosophical issues in the social sciences. Biography He studied sociology as an undergraduate at the London School of Economics , and was subsequently a postgraduate student in the sociology department at the University of Manchester, obtaining an MPhil and PhD with a thesis reporting an ethnography of an inner-city secondary school. At that time Manchester was a major centre for ethnomethodology, where it was in tension with symbolic interactionism and Marxism, and his work was influenc...
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