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,
#251
Barry Glassner
#22125
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Barry Glassner is a professor of sociology and author or co-author of nine books, including The Culture of Fear, which discussed the culture of fear phenomenon. He says that many of Americans' concerns and fears are largely unfounded. In it, Glassner decries: "The use of poignant anecdotes in place of scientific evidence, the christening of isolated incidents as trends, depictions of entire categories of people as innately dangerous ... " A new and enlarged edition updated for the Trump era was published in late 2018. In the years since, Glassner discussed the new edition on CNN's "Reliable So...
Go to Profile#252
John Milton Yinger
#13535
Overall Influence
1916 - 2011 (95 years)
John Milton Yinger was an American sociologist who was president of the American Sociological Association 1976–1977. Yinger received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1942, and was Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Oberlin College.
Go to Profile#253
Martha Beck
#11974
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Martha Nibley Beck is an American author, life coach, speaker, and sociologist who specializes in helping individuals and groups achieve greater levels of personal and professional success. She holds three degrees, a BA, MA and PhD from Harvard University. Beck is the daughter of deceased LDS Church scholar and apologist Hugh Nibley. She received national attention after publication in 2005 of her best-seller, Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith in which she recounts her experiences of surviving sexual abuse. In addition to authoring several books, Beck is a columnis...
Go to Profile#254
William I. Robinson
#6257
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
William I. Robinson is an American professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His work focuses on political economy, globalization, Latin America and historical materialism. He is a member of the International Parliamentary and Civil Society Mission to Investigate the Political Transition in Iraq.
Go to Profile#255
Serge Moscovici
#3784
Overall Influence
1925 - 2014 (89 years)
Serge Moscovici was a Romanian-born French social psychologist, director of the Laboratoire Européen de Psychologie Sociale , which he co-founded in 1974 at the Maison des sciences de l'homme in Paris. He was a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts and Officer of the Légion d'honneur, as well as a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and honorary member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Moscovici's son, Pierre Moscovici, was European Commissioner for Economic and Financial Affairs, Taxation and Customs.
Go to Profile#256
Valentine Moghadam
#18309
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Valentine Moghadam is a feminist scholar, sociologist, activist, and author whose work focuses on women in development, globalization, feminist networks, and female employment in the Middle East. She has taught and performed research at various institutions of higher education, most recently as professor of sociology and director of international affairs at Northeastern University. Previously she held the position of director of the Women's Studies Program at Purdue University, where she was also a professor of sociology. Prior to that appointment, Moghadam worked for the United Nations Educa...
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Guy Rocher
#21150
Overall Influence
1924 - Present (100 years)
Guy Arthur Auguste Rocher is a Canadian academic and sociologist. Born in Berthierville, Quebec, he received a B.A. from the Université de Montréal in 1943, an M.A. in sociology from Université Laval in 1950, and a Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard University in 1958. From 1952 until 1960 he taught at Université Laval. From 1960 he has taught at the Université de Montréal.
Go to Profile#258
Jan T. Gross
#5273
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
#259
Gloria E. Anzaldúa
#4377
Overall Influence
1942 - 2004 (62 years)
Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa was an American scholar of Chicana feminism, cultural theory, and queer theory. She loosely based her best-known book, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza , on her life growing up on the Mexico–Texas border and incorporated her lifelong experiences of social and cultural marginalization into her work. She also developed theories about the marginal, in-between, and mixed cultures that develop along borders, including on the concepts of Nepantla, Coyoxaulqui imperative, new tribalism, and spiritual activism. Her other notable publications include This Bridge Call...
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Gunter Schmidt
#19550
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Gunter Schmidt is a German sexologist, psychotherapist and social psychologist. He was born in Berlin. Schmidt was the director of the centre for sexual research in the clinic of the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf . He started many projects for research over sexuality and biographies. He was a director of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sexualforschung and president of International Academy of Sex Research .
Go to Profile#261
Paul Hirst
#9787
Overall Influence
1946 - 2003 (57 years)
Paul Quentin Hirst was a British sociologist and political theorist. He became Professor of Social Theory at Birkbeck College, London, in 1985 and held the post until his death from a stroke and brain haemorrhage.
Go to Profile#262
Jeff Hearn
#18804
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Jeffery Richard Hearn is a British sociologist, and Research Professor at the University of Huddersfield, and Professor at the Hanken School of Economics. Biography Hearn obtained his MA at the University of Oxford in 1973 and another MA in Organisational Sociology at the University of Leeds in 1974, and his PhD in Social Theory, Social Planning and Theories of Patriarchy at the University of Bradford in 1986.
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Thomas J. Scheff
#16522
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Thomas J. Scheff is an American Professor, Emeritus, Department of Sociology at University of California, Santa Barbara. His fields of study are the emotional/relational world, mental illness, restorative justice, and collective violence. He holds a BS from the University of Arizona in Physics , and a PhD in sociology from the University of California . He was at University of Wisconsin from 1959–63, when he joined the faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Go to Profile#264
David Downes
#41340
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
David Downes is a British sociologist and criminologist and is Professor Emeritus of Social Administration at the London School of Economics. Downes was one of the founder members of the National Deviancy Conference.
Go to Profile#265
Jeff Goodwin
#20658
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Jeffrey Roger Goodwin is a professor of sociology at New York University. He holds a BA, MA and PhD from Harvard University. His research interests include social movements, revolutions, political violence, and terrorism. He is a past chair of the Comparative and Historical Sociology Section, and the Collective Behavior and Social Movements Section of the American Sociological Association .
Go to Profile#266
Stephen A. Kent
#1016
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Stephen A. Kent is a professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. He researches new religious movements , and has published research on several such groups including the Children of God , the Church of Scientology, and other NRMs operating in Canada.
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Boris Dubin
#12587
Overall Influence
1946 - 2014 (68 years)
Boris Vladimirovich Dubin was a Russian sociologist, and a translator for English, French, Spanish, Latin American and Polish literature. Dubin was the head of department of sociopolitical researches at the Levada Center and the assistant to Lev Gudkov, editor-in-chief of the sociological journal Russian Public Opinion Herald published by the center. Additionally he was a lecturer of sociology of culture at the Russian State University for the Humanities and the Moscow higher school of social and economic sciences.
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Janja Lalich
#5718
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Janja Lalich is an American sociologist and writer. Lalich is best known as a foremost expert on cults and coercion, charismatic authority, power relations, ideology and social control. She is a professor emerita of sociology at the California State University, Chico.
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Benjamin Zablocki
#7253
Overall Influence
1941 - 2020 (79 years)
Benjamin Zablocki was an American professor of sociology at Rutgers University where he taught sociology of religion and social psychology. He published widely on the subject of charismatic religious movements, cults, and brainwashing.
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J. Clyde Mitchell
#6812
Overall Influence
1918 - 1995 (77 years)
James Clyde Mitchell was a British sociologist and anthropologist. In 1937 Mitchell helped found the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute group of social anthropologists/sociologists, now a part of the University of Zambia. He was influenced by Max Gluckman and conducted important research on social network analysis at the University of Manchester . In the 1940s he carried out field research into social systems and social conditions in Central Africa interviewing heads of households in villages and urban areas and observing customs. In 1952 he was on the editorial committee of the Northern Rhodesia...
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Renaud Sainsaulieu
#23687
Overall Influence
1935 - 2002 (67 years)
Renaud Sainsaulieu was a French sociologist specializing in the sociology of organizations. He was noted for promoting sociology outside academia. He was the director of the Centre d'Etudes Sociologiques at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique ; and founded the Laboratoire de Sociologie du Changement des Institutions .
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Helmut Schoeck
#13596
Overall Influence
1922 - 1993 (71 years)
Helmut Schoeck was an Austrian-German sociologist and writer best known for his work Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior . Life Schoeck, born in Graz, spent his early years in Baden-Württemberg, finishing high school in Ludwigsburg. He then studied medicine, philosophy and psychology at the universities of Munich and Tübingen. With a dissertation on Karl Mannheim, Schoeck would obtain his doctorate under Eduard Spranger.
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A. H. Halsey
#14158
Overall Influence
1923 - 2014 (91 years)
Albert Henry 'Chelly' Halsey was a British sociologist. He was Emeritus Professor of Social and Administrative Studies at the Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford.
Go to Profile#274
Zeynep Tufekci
#3644
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Zeynep Tufekci is a sociologist, and the Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University. She is also a columnist for The New York Times. Her work focuses on social media, media ethics, the social implications of new technologies, such as artificial intelligence and big data, as well as societal challenges such as the COVID-19 pandemic using complex and systems-based thinking. According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, she is one of the most prominent academic voices on social media and the new public sphere. In 2022, Tufekci was a Pulitzer Prize finalis...
Go to Profile#275
Maria Mies
#4841
Overall Influence
1931 - 2023 (92 years)
Maria Mies was a German professor of sociology, a Marxist feminist, an activist for women's rights, and an author. She came from a rural background in the Volcanic Eifel, and initially trained to be a teacher. After working for several years as a primary school teacher and qualifying as a high school instructor, she applied to the Goethe Institute, hoping to work in Africa or Asia. Assigned to a school in Pune, India, she discovered that while her male students took German courses to further their education, women for the most part took her classes to avoid marriage. Returning to study at the...
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Paul Starr
#6584
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Paul Elliot Starr is a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University. He is also the co-editor and co-founder of The American Prospect, a notable liberal magazine created in 1990. In 1994, he founded the Electronic Policy Network, or Moving Ideas, an online public policy resource. In 1993, Starr was the senior advisor for President Bill Clinton's proposed health care reform plan. He is also the president of the Sandra Starr Foundation.
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Lucy Suchman
#5303
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Lucy Suchman is Professor Emerita of Anthropology of Science and Technology in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University, in the United Kingdom, also known for her work at Xerox PARC in the 1980s and 90s.
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Johan Goudsblom
#23734
Overall Influence
1932 - 2020 (88 years)
Johan Goudsblom was a Dutch sociologist. Life He was born on 11 October 1932. He died on 17 March 2020 in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Education After completing his high school, he attended an American university.
Go to Profile#279
Michel Wieviorka
#16576
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Michel Wieviorka is a French sociologist, noted for his work on violence, terrorism, racism, social movements and the theory of social change. He was the 16th president of International Sociological Association .
Go to Profile#280
Kathleen M. Blee
#28111
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Kathleen Marie Blee is an American sociologist. She is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh. Her areas of interest include gender, race and racism, social movements, and sociology of space and place. Special interests include how gender influences racist movements, including work on women in the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.
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Charles Camic
#24713
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Charles Michael Camic is the Lorraine H. Morton Professor of sociology at Northwestern University. His research focuses on sociological theory, the sociology of science, and historical sociology. Education and career Camic received his B.A. in sociology summa cum laude from the University of Pittsburgh in 1973. He went on to receive his M.A. and Ph.D., also in sociology, from the University of Chicago in 1975 and 1979, respectively. In 1979, he became an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he was promoted to associate professor in 1984 and to full professor in 1988.
Go to Profile#282
Claus Offe
#6755
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Claus Offe is a political sociologist of Marxist orientation. He received his PhD from the University of Frankfurt and his Habilitation at the University of Konstanz. In Germany, he has held chairs for Political Science and Political Sociology at the Universities of Bielefeld and Bremen , as well as at the Humboldt-University of Berlin . He has worked as fellow and visiting professor at the Institutes for Advanced Study in Stanford, Princeton, and the Australian National University as well as Harvard University, the University of California at Berkeley and The New School University, New York.
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Joseph Berger
#13927
Overall Influence
1924 - Present (100 years)
Joseph Berger is an American sociologist and social psychologist best known for co-founding expectation states theory. Expectation states theory explains how individuals use social information about one another to create informal status hierarchies in small groups. Researchers have used this program to develop interventions that counteract the disadvantages faced most notably by black students in the classroom and women leaders in the workplace. Social scientists have also applied this work to study hiring bias against mothers and discrimination against loan applicants among other topics.
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Donatella della Porta
#9235
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Donatella della Porta is an Italian sociologist and political scientist, who is Professor of political science and political sociology at the Scuola Normale Superiore. She is known for her research in the areas of social movements, corruption, political violence, police and policies of public order. In 2022, she was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Vivek Chibber
#7383
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Vivek Aslam Chibber is an American academic, social theorist, editor, and professor of sociology at New York University, who has published widely on development, social theory, and politics. Chibber is the author of three books, The Class Matrix: Social Theory after the Cultural Turn , Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital and Locked in Place: State-Building and Late Industrialization in India .
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Kurt Heinrich Wolff
#20087
Overall Influence
1912 - 2003 (91 years)
Kurt Heinrich Wolff was a German-born American sociologist. A major contributor to the sociology of knowledge and to qualitative and phenomenological approaches in sociology, he also translated from German and from French into English many important works by Georg Simmel, Emile Durkheim and Karl Mannheim. While carrying out anthropological field research in the 1940s in a small community in the southwestern United States, Wolff initially discovered, and began to articulate and to advocate, a new qualitative methodological approach for the study of human society. The approach later proved applicable in any field of inquiry or area of human endeavor.
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Andrew Greeley
#8136
Overall Influence
1928 - 2013 (85 years)
Andrew M. Greeley was an American Catholic priest, sociologist, journalist and popular novelist. Greeley was a professor of sociology at the University of Arizona and the University of Chicago, and a research associate with the National Opinion Research Center . For many years, he wrote a weekly column for the Chicago Sun-Times and contributed regularly to The New York Times, the National Catholic Reporter, America, and Commonweal.
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Nina Lykke
#17268
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Nina Lykke is a Danish–Swedish gender studies scholar. She is noted for her work on feminist theory, and is distinguished professor of gender studies at Linköping University in Sweden. Biography Nina Lykke was born in Copenhagen, Denmark. She received a mag.art. degree in literature at the University of Copenhagen in 1981 and a dr.phil. in gender studies at Odense University, Denmark in 1992. From 1984 until 1999 she was director of the Centre for Women's and Gender Studies, the first of its kind in Denmark, at the University of Southern Denmark. She was an assistant professor from 1981 and was promoted to associate professor in 1986.
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Sharon Zukin
#13008
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Sharon L. Zukin is an American professor of sociology who specializes in modern urban life. She is a professor emerita at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She has been a fellow of the Advanced Research Collaborative at the CUNY Graduate Center and chair of the sections on community and urban sociology and consumers and consumption of the American Sociological Association Consumers and Consumption Section, as well as a visiting professor at Tongji University , the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Western Sydney.
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James Davison Hunter
#13000
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
James Davison Hunter is an American sociologist and originator of the term "Culture Wars" in his 1991 book Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. Hunter is the LaBrosse-Levinson Distinguished Professor of Religion, Culture, and Social Theory at the University of Virginia and the founder and executive director of the university's Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. He is also a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum.
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Leo Goodman
#39335
Overall Influence
1928 - 2020 (92 years)
Leo Aria Goodman was an American statistician. He was known particularly for developing statistical methods for the social sciences, including statistical methods for analyzing categorical data and data from statistical surveys.
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Jerzy Szacki
#15985
Overall Influence
1929 - 2016 (87 years)
Jerzy Ryszard Szacki was a Polish sociologist and historian of ideas. From 1973 he was a professor at the University of Warsaw, and in 1991 became a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He is considered one of the most prominent representatives of the Warsaw School of the History of Ideas.
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Charles Lemert
#19242
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Charles Lemert is an American born social theorist and sociologist. He has written extensively on social theory, globalization and culture. He has contributed to many key debates in social thought, authoring dozens of books including his text Social Things: An Introduction to the Sociological Life, 5th edition . From 1982 to 2010, he taught at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. He currently lives in New Haven, Connecticut with his family.
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Madeleine Akrich
#16134
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Madeleine Akrich is a French sociologist of technology. She served as the director of the Center for the Sociology of Innovation at Mines ParisTech from 2003 to 2013. She is known for developing actor–network theory with Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, John Law and others.
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Judith Lorber
#14553
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Judith Lorber is professor emerita of sociology and women’s studies at The CUNY Graduate Center and Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. She is a foundational theorist of social construction of gender difference and has played a vital role in the formation and transformation of gender studies. She has more recently called for a de-gendering of the social world.
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Dieter Claessens
#24779
Overall Influence
1921 - 1997 (76 years)
Dieter Claessens was a German sociologist and anthropologist. Life Returning as POW from the Soviet Union Dieter Claessens studied sociology, anthropology, and psychology in Berlin, where he got his doctorate from the Freie Universität in 1957. He took his sociological post-doctoral degree from the University of Münster, where he was called to a Chair of Sociology in 1962. 1966 he returned as professor to the Free University, and retired there 1986, continuing his research work until his death in Berlin, 1997.
Go to Profile#297
Freda Adler
#8213
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Freda Adler is a criminologist and educator, currently serving as professor emeritus at Rutgers University and a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She was President of the American Society of Criminology in 1994-1995. She has acted as a consultant to the United Nations on criminal justice matters since 1975, holding various roles within United Nations organizations. A prolific writer, Adler has published in a variety of criminological areas, including female criminality, international issues in crime, piracy, drug abuse, and social control theories.
Go to Profile#298
Arthur Stinchcombe
#19384
Overall Influence
1933 - 2018 (85 years)
Arthur Leonard Stinchcombe was an American sociologist. Stinchcombe was born on May 16, 1933, in Clare County, Michigan, and attended Central Michigan University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics. He then pursued graduate study in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, earning a doctorate.
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Aníbal Quijano
#17853
Overall Influence
1930 - 2018 (88 years)
Aníbal Quijano was a Peruvian sociologist and humanist thinker, known for having developed the concepts of "coloniality of power" and "coloniality of knowledge". His body of work has been influential in the fields of decolonial studies and critical theory.
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M. Lynne Markus
#14350
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
M. Lynne Markus is an American Information systems researcher, and John W. Poduska, Sr. Chair of Information and Process Management, Bentley University, who has made fundamental contributions to the study of enterprise systems and inter-enterprise systems, IT and organizational change, and knowledge management.
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