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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List of the most influential people in Sociology,

#2251

Carlo Petrini

#170640

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Carlo Petrini is an Italian scientist and Director of Researh at the Italian National Institute of Health , where he is head of the Bioethics Unit. Biography Petrini studied at the university of Turin where he graduated in 1988 with a degree in Biological Sciences. The year after he began at the Istituto Superiore di Sanità where he developed an interest in problems tied to ethics in scientific research, in particular in the biomedical ethics.

#2252

Virginia Apuzzo

#62683

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Virginia "Ginny" Apuzzo is an American gay rights and AIDS activist. She is a former executive director of the National LGBTQ Task Force. She served as executive deputy of the New York State Consumer Protection Board and as the vice chair of the New York State AIDS Advisory Council. She was also President of the New York State Civil Service Commission and Commissioner of the New York State Department of Civil Service. In 1996, she became the Associate Deputy Secretary of Labor at the United States Department of Labor, and in 1997 she became the Assistant to the President for Management and Administration under the Clinton administration.

#2253

Gerald D. Suttles

#178835

Overall Influence

1932 - 2017 (85 years)

Gerald Dale Suttles was an American urban sociologist. Gerald Suttles was born in North Carolina to parents Gertrude and Berlin Suttles. He served in the United States Navy from 1951 to 1955 before attending Reed College. Suttles earned his doctorate from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. While researching his first book, Suttles moved to what became the Tri-Taylor area of Chicago's Near West Side, where he lived for three years. The Social Order of the Slum was published in 1968, and won the C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems that year, followed by the University of Chicago's Gordon J.

#2254

Alison Hennegan

#76661

Overall Influence

Alison Hennegan is a lecturer at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity Hall. She is also a prominent campaigner for gay and lesbian rights in the UK and a journalist. Hennegan's academic work focuses on lesbian and gay themes in English literature, particularly in British Modernism. She began writing her PhD thesis, “Literature and the Homosexual Cult, 1890–1920” in Cambridge in 1970, but her heavy involvement in gay activism forced her to put her research on hold. She returned to the academy in the 1980s and has published articles on the lesbian reader, Oscar Wilde and the Symbolist and decadent movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

#2255

Simon Schwartzman

#182190

Overall Influence

#2256

Edward Telles

#77242

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Edward Telles is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine and Director of the Center for Research on International Migration. He has authored several books and many articles, winning numerous prizes including the Distinguished Scholarly Publication Award from the American Sociological Association. He has been a leader in the study of race, color and ethnicity globally and throughout the Americas as well as on immigration and immigrant integration in the United States.

#2257

Dominik Bartmanski

#129690

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (46 years)

Dominik Maksymilian Bartmanski is a cultural sociologist and social theorist at the Technical University of Berlin. He is known for his work on consumption and material culture as well as icons and nostalgia which are all themes of his book with Ian Woodward, Vinyl: The Analogue Record in the Digital Age .

#2258

Graeme Newman

#101871

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Graeme R. Newman is an American scholar of criminal justice and Distinguished Teaching Professor at University at Albany. He is a recipient of J. Francis Finnegan Memorial Prize in Criminology. Newman is the vice president of Center for Problem Oriented Policing and pioneered the establishment of the United Nations Crime and Justice Information Network. He is known for his research on crime prevention.

#2259

Vittorio Cotesta

#43738

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Vittorio Cotesta - Roccagorga is an Italian social scientist. At present he is conducting research into global society, cosmopolitism and human rights, sociological theories, cultures, civilizations and ethnic conflict.

#2260

Maryse Marpsat

#134120

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Maryse Marpsat is a French sociologist and statistician whose work employs methods drawn from sociology and statistics but also mathematics. Her major sociological works concern poverty, inequality and homeless situation. She is a civil servant, administrator of the French National Institute of Statistics and a fellow of the CSU, a French research institute specializing in sociological studies in urban societies.

#2261

Simon Clarke

#80000

Overall Influence

1946 - 2022 (76 years)

Simon Clarke was a British sociologist who specialised in social theory, political economy, labour relations, and the history of sociology. He had a particular interest in employment relations in China, Vietnam, and the former-Soviet nations. He was Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Warwick.

#2262

Stephen S. Chang

#64234

Overall Influence

1918 - 1996 (78 years)

Stephen Szu Shiang Chang was a Chinese-born American food scientist who was involved in the research of lipids and flavorss in food, including the development of technology transfer between the United States and Taiwan.

#2263

Nicholas H. Wolfinger

Nicholas H. Wolfinger

#174876

Overall Influence

Nicholas H. Wolfinger is an American researcher, academic and educator. He is Professor in the Department of Family and Consumer Studies and Adjunct Professor of Sociology at the University of Utah. His research is focused on sociology of the family, religion, social demography and quantitative and qualitative methods.

#2264

Luc Boltanski

#182550

Overall Influence

#2265

Jane Pilcher

#171510

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Jane Pilcher SFHEA is a sociologist specialising in names and naming, gender, and ageing. She is an associate lecturer at Nottingham Trent University, having previously held posts at Cardiff University and the University of Leicester.

#2266

Victoria Pitts-Taylor

#174849

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Victoria Pitts-Taylor is Professor of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Wesleyan University, Connecticut, and also Professor of Science in Society and Sociology there. She was formerly a professor of sociology at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center, New York, and visiting fellow at the Centre for the Study of Social Difference, Columbia University, New York. Pitts-Taylor is also former co-editor of the journal Women's Studies Quarterly. She has won the Robert K. Merton Book Award from the section on Science, Knowledge and Technology of the American Sociological Association, a...

#2267

Alfredo Mirandé

#71992

Overall Influence

Alfredo Mirandé is a Mexican American sociologist and attorney with a focus on ethnic studies, gender, and law. He is noted for his theory on gringo justice. A Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside, he was a National Research Council Fellow, a Rockefeller Fellow, and was inducted into the Illinois State University Hall of Fame. He is most notably credited for inspiring the development of a Chicano sociology that is oriented from a Chicano worldview, rather than from an Anglo worldview of Mexican Americans. This included critiquing th...

#2268

Jacqueline Hagan

#158147

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Jacqueline Maria Hagan is a Chilean-born American sociologist who has been the Kenan Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill since 2017. She is known for her research on immigration from Latin America to the United States, and on the effects of the United States' immigration policies on immigrants. This work has included studies of the social effects of deportations of undocumented immigrants to their home countries, and research on changes in the frequency of different causes of migrant deaths along the Mexico–United States border.

#2269

Abraham Lavender

Abraham Lavender

#129156

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Abraham Donald Lavender was a professor of sociology at Florida International University in Miami, Florida, where his special areas of interest include ethnic relations, Judaica, political sociology, urban sociology, the sociology of sexuality, and social deviance. He was editor-in-chief of Journal of Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian Crypto Jews, and had served as president of the Society for Crypto-Judaic Studies.

#2270

Dorothy Y. Ko

#117636

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Dorothy Ko is a Professor of History and Women's Studies at the Barnard College of Columbia University. She is a historian of early modern China, known for her multi-disciplinary and multi-dimensional research. As a historian of early modern China, she has endeavored to engage with the field of modern China studies; as a China scholar, she has always positioned herself within the study of women and gender and applied feminist approaches in her work; as a historian, she has ventured across disciplinary boundaries, into fields that include literature, visual and material culture, science and te...

#2271

Jeff Manza

#83405

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Jeff Manza is an American sociologist and professor of sociology at New York University. He is a political sociologist, known for his work on voting behavior, public opinion, and felony disenfranchisement in the United States . He has also researched the relationship between support for government programs and economic downturns. He created The Sociology Project, a series of introductory sociology textbooks written by himself and NYU colleagues that aim to reorient the presentation of sociological ideas to beginning students.

#2272

Angela Dwyer

#113804

Overall Influence

Angela Dwyer is an Australian social scientist and writer. Her specialist area is policing studies, with a particular interest in how lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender young people experience policing.

#2273

Dána-Ain Davis

#113180

Overall Influence

Dána-Ain Davis is a professor of urban studies at Queens College, City University of New York and the Director of the Center for the Study of Women and Society. Biography Dána-Ain Davis was born in New York in 1958. She attended the University of Maryland, College Park to study film and communication, and graduated with her BA in 1980. Out of college, Davis worked at The Village Voice, a newspaper company based in New York that also wrote stories of culture and art. Davis also worked at WNYC-TV, a television station during her lifetime. She then ventured into the nonprofit sector working in t...

#2274

Farideh Heyat

#90866

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Farideh Heyat is a British-Iranian anthropologist and a writer based in London. She is a retired lecturer of SOAS, University of London and American University of Central Asia in Bishkek. Heyat is the author of numerous articles on women in Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan. She is also the author of the following books: Azeri Women in Transition: Women in Soviet and post-Soviet Azerbaijan and The Land of Forty Tribes.

#2275

Yreina Cervantez

#85404

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Yreina Cervantez is an American artist and Chicana activist who is known for her multimedia painting, murals, and printmaking. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, and her work is in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Mexican Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum, and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.

#2276

Steve Maharey

#111628

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Steven Maharey is a New Zealand academic and former politician of the Labour Party. Elected to Parliament for the first time in 1990 , he was Minister of Social Development and Employment from 1999 to 2005 and Minister of Education from 2005 to 2007. He retired from Parliament at the 2008 general election to become the Vice-Chancellor at Massey University.

#2277

Tahu Kukutai

#169159

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Tahu Hera Kukutai is a New Zealand sociology academic; she is Māori, of Ngāti Tīpā, Ngāti Mahanga, Ngāti Kinohaku, Ngāti Ngawaero and Te Aupōuri descent, and as of 2019 is a full professor at the University of Waikato. In 2022 Kukutai was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society Te Apārangi.

#2278

Patricia Kingori

#159083

Overall Influence

Patricia Kingori is a British Kenyan sociologist who is a professor at the University of Oxford. Her research considers the experiences of frontline health workers around the world. She is particularly interested in misinformation and pseudoscience. In 2015, Kingori was included on the Powerlist.

#2279

Bonita H. Valien

#65466

Overall Influence

1912 - 2011 (99 years)

Bonita H. Valien was an African-American sociologist. She was an associate professor of sociology at Fisk University, a historically black university in Nashville, Tennessee, and the author of several books about desegregation in the Southern United States.

#2280

Harry Wu

#4401

Overall Influence

1937 - 2016 (79 years)

Harry Wu was a Chinese-American human rights activist. Wu spent 19 years in Chinese labor camps, and he became a resident and citizen of the United States. In 1992, he founded the Laogai Research Foundation.

#2281

Isabelle Dussauge

#147297

Overall Influence

Isabelle Dussauge is a science, technology and society researcher at the Department of History of Science and Ideas, Uppsala University, Sweden and former assistant professor at the Department of Thematic Studies , Linköping University, Sweden. She is also the co-founder, with Anelis Kaiser, of The NeuroGenderings Network, and acted as guest editor, again with Kaiser on the journal Neuroethics.

#2282

Neda Maghbouleh

#103716

Overall Influence

Neda Maghbouleh is an American sociologist, scholar, writer, author, and educator. She is the Canada Research Chair in Migration, Race, and Identity and associate professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto Mississauga.

#2283

James Lynch

#177442

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

James Patrick Lynch is an American criminologist and professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland. Education Lynch graduated from Northwest Catholic High School in West Hartford, Connecticut in 1967, after which he received his bachelor's degree in sociology from Wesleyan University in 1971. He later received a masters' and Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago in 1975 and 1983, respectively.

#2284

David Bordua

#180835

Overall Influence

David Joseph Bordua is an American sociologist and emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He retired from the University of Illinois between September 1, 1993 and August 30, 1994, after 31 years on the faculty there. While at the University of Illinois, he studied public opinion on handgun bans in Massachusetts and California.

#2285

Rubén Juste

#181007

Overall Influence

1985 - Present (39 years)

Rubén Juste de Ancos is a Spanish sociologist, researcher and political consultant. Biography Rubén Juste is a graduate and doctor in Sociology by the Complutense University of Madrid. His doctoral thesis focused on the revolving doors in the IBEX 35.

#2286

Feliks Gross

#38864

Overall Influence

1906 - 2006 (100 years)

Feliks Gross was a Polish-American sociologist. Before World War II, he became a lecturer at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. During the war, he escaped to USA, where he would hold many positions in academia, including a professorship at Graduate Centre and Brooklyn College in City University of New York and at the University of Wyoming.

#2287

David M. Halperin

#183597

Overall Influence

#2288

Shiphra Ginsburg

#109962

Overall Influence

Shiphra Rachel Ginsburg is a Canadian physician-scientist. In 2019, Ginsburg was appointed a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Medical Education Research at the University of Toronto. Early life and education Ginsburg completed her Bachelor of Arts degree at Queen's University at Kingston and her Medicinæ Doctorem et Chirurgiæ Magistrum at McGill University. Following this, she enrolled at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education for her Master of Education degree before leaving North America for her PhD at Maastricht University.

#2289

Alphia Possamai-Inesedy

#178813

Overall Influence

Alphia Possamai-Inesedy is an Australian sociologist who is Director of the Sydney City Campus at the University of Western Sydney. She is the Vice President of the Australian Sociological Association.

#2290

Xiao Qiang

#12268

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Xiao Qiang is the Director and Research Scientist of the Counter-Power Lab, an interdisciplinary faculty-student research group focusing on digital rights and internet freedom, based in the School of Information, University of California, Berkeley. He also serves as the director of the China Internet Project at Berkeley. Xiao is an adjunct professor at the School of Information and the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also the founder and editor-in-chief of China Digital Times, a bilingual news website.

#2291

William Sears

#28630

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

William Penton Sears , also referred to as Dr. Bill, is an American pediatrician and the author or co-author of parenting books. Sears is a celebrity doctor, and has been a guest on various television talk shows. Sears is a proponent of the attachment parenting philosophy, and is most well known for authoring The Baby Book, which popularized that style of parenting.

#2292

Anne Briar Smith

#165679

Overall Influence

1940 - 2016 (76 years)

Anne Briar Smith was a New Zealand professor at the University of Otago, and was a pioneering children's rights researcher. Early life and education Smith was born on 13 August 1940 in Porthcawl, Wales, to Dora and Geoff Riddall. Her father worked for the Iraq Petroleum Company, and when that necessitated the family move to Syria, Smith boarded at the Welsh Girls' School in England, aged nine. The family moved to New Zealand in 1954, and Smith attended Te Aroha College, where she was dux in both 1956 and 1957.

#2293

Margarita María Birriel Salcedo

#138536

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Margarita M. Birriel Salcedo is a tenured professor in the Department of Modern and American History at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Granada. She is an expert in women's history and women's studies.

#2294

Celeste Watkins-Hayes

#99604

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Celeste Watkins-Hayes is a public policy scholar and interim dean of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy of the University of Michigan. Career Celeste Watkins-Hayes is the Interim Dean and the founding director of the Center for Racial Justice at the University of Michigan's Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. She holds a University Professorship in Diversity and Social Transformation, the Jean Fairfax Collegiate Professorship in the Ford School of Public Policy, and is a professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan.

#2295

Daniele Conversi

#94386

Overall Influence

Daniele Conversi is a political historian, social theorist, academic, and author. He is a research professor at the University of the Basque Country and the Ikerbasque Foundation for Science. Conversi is most known for his contributions to the fields of political and social history, particularly for improving contemporary understanding of historical events, movements, and societal changes, specialising in Spain and the north Mediterranean. Best known for his comparative work on the cultural politics of nationalism and, more recently, for his research on nationalism and climate change. His books include Cambiamenti Climatici.

#2296

Tony Coxon

#180570

Overall Influence

1938 - 2012 (74 years)

Anthony Peter Macmillan Coxon , better known as Tony Coxon, was a sociologist and pioneer of multidimensional scaling. His fields of research included religion, occupations, social networks and male sexuality. Appointed professor at the age of 35, Coxon later became first director of the ESRC Research Centre and subsequently worked at the Institute for Social and Economic Research of the University of Essex, where he managed the British Household Panel Survey.

#2297

Chauntelle Tibbals

Chauntelle Tibbals

#133016

Overall Influence

Chauntelle Tibbals is a sociologist from the United States. Her scholarly focus includes studies in gender, sexualities, work and organizations, media and new media, popular culture, and qualitative research methods.

#2298

Maqbool Dada

#32314

Overall Influence

Maqbool Dada is a professor at Carey Business School, Johns Hopkins University, with expertise in the areas of operations management, healthcare, and marketing. He is also a core faculty member at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine’s Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality.

#2299

Thomas D. Cook

#104239

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Thomas Dixon Cook is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Northwestern University and Emeritus Fellow at their Institute for Policy Research, where he was formerly the Joan and Sarepta Harrison Chair of Ethics and Justice. In 2014, he became a senior fellow at Mathematica Policy Research.

#2300

Jane Freedman

#117066

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Jane Freedman is a British–French sociologist and international relations scholar. She is known for her research on issues relating to gender, violence, conflict and migration, including sexual and gender-based violence in armed conflicts and against migrants and refugees. Her research has focused e.g. on violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the refugees of the Syrian Civil War. She "examines women's experiences of forced migration, the insecurities they face and the obstacles that exist to providing full protection of women."

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