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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Sociology,

#2751

George F. Stewart

1908 - 1982 (74 years)

George F. Stewart was an American food scientist who was involved in processing, preservation, chemistry, and microbiology of poultry and egg-based food products. He also became the first president of the International Union of Food Science and Technology after it was formed at the 1970 conference in Washington, D.C., from the International Congress of Food Science and Technology.

#2752

Alexander Goldenweiser

1880 - 1940 (60 years)

Alexander Aleksandrovich Goldenweiser was a Russian-born U.S. anthropologist and sociologist. Biography Alexander Alexandrovich Goldenweiser was born in Kiev, Ukraine, in 1880. He emigrated to the United States in 1900. He studied anthropology under Franz Boas, and earned his AB degree from Columbia University in 1902, his AM degree in 1904, and his Ph.D. in 1910.

#2753

Henry Pratt Fairchild

Henry Pratt Fairchild

1880 - 1956 (76 years)

Henry Pratt Fairchild was a distinguished American sociologist who was actively involved in many of the controversial issues of his time. He wrote about race relations, abortion and contraception, and immigration. He was involved with the founding of Planned Parenthood and served as President to the American Eugenics Society.

#2754

Paul H. Landis

1901 - 1985 (84 years)

Paul Henry Landis, was an American sociologist. A prolific writer of over 20 books and 100 journal articles, Landis's work spanned the fields of rural sociology, Natural Resource Sociology, Sociology of Education, Adolescence, Social Control, and many other topics. Born in Cuba, Illinois, Landis was raised in a fundamentalist religious upbringing, before attending Greenville College and eventually the University of Michigan for a master's degree and The University of Minnesota for a PhD. After graduation from the University of Minnesota in 1931, Landis joined the faculty of South Dakota State University as an assistant professor in the Department of Rural Sociology.

#2755

Albert Salomon

1891 - 1966 (75 years)

Albert Salomon was a German-Jewish sociologist. He was the nephew of Alice Salomon, a pioneer of the academic discipline of social work. Studies He first studied history of art, history of religions and philosophy at the Humboldt University of Berlin from 1910. He later studied philosophy in Freiburg and Heidelberg, where he came into contact with Max Weber and Georg Lukács, among others. During World War I, he served as a nurse, and in 1921 he took his doctorate in the culture of friendship in Germany in the 19th Century.

#2756

Marcel Granet

1884 - 1940 (56 years)

Marcel Granet was a French sociologist, ethnologist and sinologist. As a follower of Émile Durkheim and Édouard Chavannes, Granet was one of the first to bring sociological methods to the study of China. Granet was revered in his own time as a sociological sinologist, or sinological sociologist, and member of the Durkheimian school of sociology.

#2757

John Porter

1921 - 1979 (58 years)

John Arthur Porter was a Canadian sociologist from 1950 to the late 1970s. His work in the field of social stratification opened up new areas of inquiry for many sociologists in Canada. Porter was born in Vancouver and completed his education at the London School of Economics in the United Kingdom. There, he became interested in studies of social class. On returning to Canada he joined the faculty of Carleton University. He remained at Carleton as a professor, and later, as department chairman, dean and academic vice-president. He was also visiting professor at Harvard and the University of ...

#2758

Paul Massing

1902 - 1979 (77 years)

Paul Wilhelm Massing was a German sociologist. Life and career Born in Grumbach in the Rhine Province, he attended school in Cologne, and later studied economics and social sciences at Frankfurt University, when Franz Neumann was there and at Cologne Handelshochschule . He graduated in 1926 as a Diplom-Kaufmann . A year later, he studied for one term at the Sorbonne in Paris and prepared his dissertation on agrarian conditions of France in 19th century and the agrarian program of the French socialist parties. In 1928, he returned to Frankfurt University to study with Wilhelm Gerloff and at...

#2759

Delores P. Aldridge

1900 - Present (125 years)

Delores P. Aldridge is an American sociologist. Aldridge was the first African-American faculty member at Emory University, and the founder of the first African American and African studies program in the American south.

#2760

Charles Josiah Galpin

1864 - 1947 (83 years)

Charles Josiah Galpin was an American academic. Galpin was a trailblazer of rural sociology, known for advancing research in analysis of rural populations, rural standards of living, rural social organization, and social structures. Galpin was a rural sociologist, professor, author, pastor, and advocate for rural populations. He published 112 works in 245 publications in one language and 2,667 library holdings including The Social Anatomy of an Agricultural Community ; Rural Life ; My Drift into Rural Sociology ; and Rural Social Problems . His early career set the stage for his influential c...

#2761

Paul Fauconnet

1874 - 1938 (64 years)

Paul Fauconnet was a French sociologist who is best known as a contributor to the L'Année Sociologique. Fauconnet aggregated in philosophy in 1892 and earned his doctorate in philosophy in 1895. He also earned a further doctorate in law in 1920, although his interest in the law was purely scholarly and he never practiced as a lawyer. He became a professor at the faculty of letters in 1907 at the University of Toulouse and later chargé de cours at the faculty of letters in 1921 in Paris, obtaining a chair in 1932. His dissertation was entitled La responsabilité: Etude de sociologie . It adopt...

#2762

Eddie Roux

1903 - 1966 (63 years)

Eddie Roux was a Transvaal Colony-born botanist, academic, writer, member of the South African Communist Party and anti-apartheid activist. Early life He was born Edward Roux to Afrikaner father Phillip R. Roux, a pharmacist and botanist, who was involved in the Labour Party and English mother, Edith May Wilson. He grew up in Bezuidenhout Valley, Johannesburg. Roux's political view were further inspired by the events of the 1917 Russian Revolution. After matriculating at Jeppe High School, he enrolled at the University of Witwatersrand and studied botany and zoology. At university, he joined ...

#2763

Shridhar Venkatesh Ketkar

1884 - 1937 (53 years)

Shridhar Venkatesh Ketkar was a Marathi sociologist, historian and novelist from Maharashtra, India. He is principally known as the chief editor of Maharashtriya Jnanakosha, the first-ever encyclopedia in the Marathi language.

#2764

Hilda Weiss

1900 - 1981 (81 years)

Hilda Weiss was a sociologist, trade unionist, and socialist. She lived in Germany until 1933 when Hitler came to power, then escaped to France. In 1939 she emigrated to the United States and lived there until her death in 1981.

#2765

Vera Mae Green

1928 - 1982 (54 years)

Vera Mae Green was an American anthropologist, educator, and scholar, who made major contributions in the fields of Caribbean studies, interethnic studies, black family studies and the study of poverty and the poor. She was one of the first African-American Caribbeanists and the first to focus on Dutch Caribbean culture. She developed a "methodology for the study of African American Anthropology" that acknowledged the diversity among and within black families, communities and cultures. Her other areas of research included mestizos in Mexico and communities in India and Israel. "[C]ommitted to...

#2766

Arthur Salz

1881 - 1963 (82 years)

Arthur Salz was a German professor of sociology and economics who wrote on mercantilism, imperialism, and power. He taught at the University of Heidelberg before being forced to flee Germany because of his Jewish faith. He was familiar with the Stefan George circle and married Sophie Kantorowiz, the sister of historian Ernst Kantorowicz.

#2767

Patrick Murphy Malin

1903 - 1964 (61 years)

Patrick Murphy Malin was an American activist and administrator who followed Roger Nash Baldwin as the second Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union. Early life Malin was born in Joplin, Missouri in 1903, the son of a banker. He entered the family business at age ten, and was expected to eventually become president of the bank. However, Woodrow Wilson's World War I speeches gave him a desire to travel and get a government job. He attended the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, graduating as valedictorian in 1924.

#2768

William Lyman Underwood

1864 - 1929 (65 years)

William Lyman Underwood was an American photographer who was also involved in the research of time-temperature canning research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1895 to 1896. Biography A native of Boston, Massachusetts, Underwood was the second son of William James Underwood, one of the nine children of William Underwood, the founder of the William Underwood Company.

#2769

Joseph Husslein

1873 - 1952 (79 years)

Joseph C. Husslein, S.J. was a key figure in the early twentieth century in the development of American Catholic social thought. Husslein was one of several figures, such as John A. Ryan, trying to apply the Catholic social teaching of Pope Leo XIII’s watershed encyclical Rerum novarum . In the next decades Husslein would write over 500 articles on Catholic social teaching. The national Jesuit weekly magazine America published most of these articles. Husslein worked as an editor of the magazine.

#2770

Stanisław Ossowski

Stanisław Ossowski

1897 - 1963 (66 years)

Stanisław Ossowski was one of Poland's most important sociologists. He held professorships at Łódź University and Warsaw University . Life Ossowski first contributed to logic and aesthetics before moving on to sociology. He studied philosophy at the University of Warsaw, his teachers were i.a. Tadeusz Kotarbiński, Jan Łukasiewicz and Władysław Tatarkiewicz. He also studied in Paris , in Rome and in London. He took part in the 1920 war. Doctorate wrote to Tadeusz Kotarbiński at the University of Warsaw. He took part in the September campaign. He spent the occupation in Lviv and Warsaw. He ta...

#2771

Eva Verbitsky Hunt

1934 - 1980 (46 years)

Muriel Eva Verbitsky de Hunt was an Argentine cultural anthropologist, academic and writer who moved to the United States in the late 1950s. She is remembered for her contributions to symbolic anthropology and ethnohistory. Together with her husband Robert Hunt, she performed innovative regional work in Oaxaca, Mexico, in the 1960s.

#2772

Mary Roberts Coolidge

Mary Roberts Coolidge

1860 - 1945 (85 years)

Mary Roberts Coolidge , also known as Mary Roberts Smith, was an American sociologist and author. She was an instructor at Wellesley College before joining the faculty of Stanford University, where she became the first full-time American professor of sociology. She later founded the sociology department of Mills College.

#2773

Elmer Pendell

1894 - 1982 (88 years)

Elmer Pendell was an American eugenicist and sociologist. Early life Pendell was born in Waverly, New York to George and Ida Harris PenDell. Pendell received his B.S. from the University of Oregon; M.A. from the University of Chicago; PhD from Cornell University; L.L.B. from George Washington University.

#2774

Yves Stourdzé

1947 - 1986 (39 years)

Yves Stourdzé was a French sociologist. He studied technical and institutional conditions for innovation and how acceptable the effects of these are on society. He has also produced one of the most pertinent analyses of the phenomenon of informatization.

#2775

David Glass

1911 - 1978 (67 years)

David Victor Glass was an eminent English sociologist and was one of the few sociologists elected to the Royal Society. He is also one of the very few people to be elected both Fellow of the British Academy and Fellow of the Royal Society. He was professor of sociology at the London School of Economics, 1948–1978.

#2776

Mary Mims

1882 - 1967 (85 years)

Mary Mims was born in Minden, Louisiana. She was a community organizer, teacher, educator, humanitarian, lecturer, and a pioneering sociologist. She was the founder of the "community organization movement" in cooperative extension. She was an extension services specialist in community organizing and worked for Louisiana State University. She was a state community worker for Louisiana.

#2777

Walter Schiff

1866 - 1950 (84 years)

#2778

Julian Hochfeld

Julian Hochfeld

1911 - 1966 (55 years)

Julian Hochfeld was a Polish sociologist. His family originated of German Polish ethnicity, but preferred to stay in new Poland and then assimilated as Polish since the end of World War I. Professor of the University of Warsaw, he is remembered as a major contributor to theories of Polish communism, Marxism and socialism. In his last years he worked for UNESCO. He was a proponent of Open Marxism.

#2779

Julieta Kirkwood

Julieta Kirkwood

1936 - 1985 (49 years)

María Julieta Kirkwood Bañados was a Chilean sociologist, political scientist, university professor and feminist activist. She is considered one of the founders and impellers of the Chilean feminist movement in the 1980s. She is considered the forerunner of Gender studies in Chile.

#2780

Frederick German Detweiler

1881 - 1960 (79 years)

Frederick German Detweiler was an American sociologist and expert on race relations, best known for his 1922 book The Negro Press in the United States, published by University of Chicago Press. At the time of his death he was Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Denison University and a Fellow Emeritus of the American Sociological Association.

#2781

Sabin Manuilă

1894 - 1964 (70 years)

Sabin Manuilă was an Austro-Hungarian-born Romanian statistician, demographer and physician. A nationalist activist during World War I, he became noted for his pioneering research into the biostatistics of Transylvania and Banat regions, as well as a promoter of eugenics and social interventionism. As a bio- and geopolitician, Manuilă advocated the consolidation of Greater Romania through population exchanges, colonization, state-sponsored assimilation, or discriminatory policies.

#2782

Floyd Schmoe

1895 - 2001 (106 years)

Floyd Wilfred Schmoe was a Quaker, pacifist, author, college professor, marine biologist, and park ranger living in the Seattle, Washington area for most of his life. He earned Japan's highest civilian honor for his peace activism and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize three times.

#2783

Wilbert E. Moore

1914 - 1987 (73 years)

Wilbert E. Moore was an American sociologist noted, with Kingsley Davis, for their explanation and justification for social stratification, based their idea of "functional necessity." Biography Moore took his Ph.D. at Harvard University's Department of Sociology in 1940. Moore along with Kingsley Davis, Robert Merton and John Riley were part of Talcott Parsons first group of PhD students. Moore is perhaps best known for Some Principles of Stratification . Moore and Davis wrote this paper while at Princeton University where he remained until mid-1960s. This was followed by a period at the Russ...

#2784

Adolph Lowe

1893 - 1995 (102 years)

Adolph Lowe was a German sociologist and economist. His best known student was Robert Heilbroner. He was born in Stuttgart and died in Wolfenbüttel. Major publications of Adolph Lowe Arbeitslosigkeit und Kriminalität, 1914."Zur Methode der Kriegswirtschaftsgesetzgebung", 1915, Die Hilfe"Die freie Konkurrenz", 1915, Die HilfeWirtschaftliche Demobilisierung, 1916."Mitteleuropäische Demobilisierung", 1917, Wirtschaftszeitung der Zentralmächte."Die ausführende Gewalt in der Ernährungspolitik", 1917, Europäische Staats- und Wirtschaftszeitung"Die Massenpreisung im System der Volksernährung", 1917,...

#2785

Johann Plenge

1874 - 1963 (89 years)

Johann Max Emanuel Plenge was a German sociologist. He was professor of political economy at the University of Münster. In his book 1789 and 1914, Plenge contrasted the 'Ideas of 1789' and the 'Ideas of 1914' . He argued: "Under the necessity of war, socialist ideas have been driven into German economic life, its organisation has grown together into a new spirit, and so the assertion of our nation for mankind has given birth to the idea of 1914, the idea of German organisation, the national unity of state socialism". To Plenge, as for many other German nationalists and socialists, organization meant socialism and a planned economy .

#2786

Dimitrie Gusti

1880 - 1955 (75 years)

Dimitrie Gusti was a Romanian sociologist, ethnologist, historian, and voluntarist philosopher; a professor at the University of Iaşi and the University of Bucharest, he served as Romania's Minister of Education in 1932–1933. Gusti was elected a member of the Romanian Academy in 1919, and was its president between 1944 and 1946. He was the main contributor to the creation of a new Romanian school of sociology.

#2787

Émile Durkheim

1858 - 1917 (59 years)

David Émile Durkheim was a French sociologist. Durkheim formally established the academic discipline of sociology and is commonly cited as one of the principal architects of modern social science, along with both Karl Marx and Max Weber.

#2788

Georg Simmel

1858 - 1918 (60 years)

Georg Simmel was a German sociologist, philosopher, and critic. Simmel was influential in the field of sociology. Simmel was one of the first generation of German sociologists: his neo-Kantian approach laid the foundations for sociological antipositivism, asking what is society?—directly alluding to Kant's what is nature?—presenting pioneering analyses of social individuality and fragmentation. For Simmel, culture referred to "the cultivation of individuals through the agency of external forms which have been objectified in the course of history." Simmel discussed social and cultural phenomen...

#2789

Marcel Mauss

1872 - 1950 (78 years)

Marcel Mauss was a French sociologist and anthropologist known as the "father of French ethnology". The nephew of Émile Durkheim, Mauss, in his academic work, crossed the boundaries between sociology and anthropology. Today, he is perhaps better recognised for his influence on the latter discipline, particularly with respect to his analyses of topics such as magic, sacrifice and gift exchange in different cultures around the world. Mauss had a significant influence upon Claude Lévi-Strauss, the founder of structural anthropology. His most famous work is The Gift .

#2790

William Graham Sumner

William Graham Sumner

1840 - 1910 (70 years)

William Graham Sumner was an American clergyman, social scientist, and neoclassical liberal. He taught social sciences at Yale University—where he held the nation's first professorship in sociology—and became one of the most influential teachers at any other major school.

#2791

Vilfredo Pareto

Vilfredo Pareto

1848 - 1923 (75 years)

Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto was an Italian polymath . He made several important contributions to economics, particularly in the study of income distribution and in the analysis of individuals' choices. He was also responsible for popularising the use of the term "elite" in social analysis.

#2792

C. Wright Mills

C. Wright Mills

1916 - 1962 (46 years)

Charles Wright Mills was an American sociologist, and a professor of sociology at Columbia University from 1946 until his death in 1962. Mills published widely in both popular and intellectual journals, and is remembered for several books, such as The Power Elite, White Collar: The American Middle Classes, and The Sociological Imagination. Mills was concerned with the responsibilities of intellectuals in post–World War II society, and he advocated public and political engagement over disinterested observation. One of Mills's biographers, Daniel Geary, writes that Mills's writings had a "parti...

#2793

Karl Mannheim

1893 - 1947 (54 years)

Karl Mannheim was an influential Hungarian sociologist during the first half of the 20th century. He is a key figure in classical sociology, as well as one of the founders of the sociology of knowledge. Mannheim is best known for his book Ideology and Utopia , in which he distinguishes between partial and total ideologies, the latter representing comprehensive worldviews distinctive to particular social groups, and also between ideologies that provide support for existing social arrangements, and utopias, which look to the future and propose a transformation of society.

#2794

Thorstein Veblen

Thorstein Veblen

1857 - 1929 (72 years)

Thorstein Bunde Veblen was an American economist and sociologist who, during his lifetime, emerged as a well-known critic of capitalism. In his best-known book, The Theory of the Leisure Class , Veblen coined the concepts of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure. Historians of economics regard Veblen as the founding father of the institutional economics school. Contemporary economists still theorize Veblen's distinction between "institutions" and "technology", known as the Veblenian dichotomy.

#2795

Florian Znaniecki

Florian Znaniecki

1882 - 1958 (76 years)

Florian Witold Znaniecki was a Polish and American philosopher and sociologist who taught and wrote in Poland and in the United States. Over the course of his work he shifted his focus from philosophy to sociology. He remains a major figure in the history of Polish and American sociology; the founder of Polish academic sociology, and of an entire school of thought in sociology. He won international renown as co-author, with William I. Thomas, of the study, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America , which is considered the foundation of modern empirical sociology. He also made major contributi...

#2796

Norbert Elias

1897 - 1990 (93 years)

Norbert Elias was a German sociologist who later became a British citizen. He is especially famous for his theory of civilizing/decivilizing processes. Biography Elias was born on 22 June 1897 in Breslau in Prussia's Silesia Province to Hermann Elias and Sophie Elias, née Gallewski . His father was a native of Kempen and a businessman in the textile industry. His mother was a native of the Jewish community of Breslau itself. After passing the abitur in 1915, Norbert Elias volunteered for the German army in World War I and was employed as a telegrapher, first at the Eastern front, then at the Western front.

#2797

Albion Woodbury Small

Albion Woodbury Small

1854 - 1928 (74 years)

Albion Woodbury Small founded the first independent department of sociology in the United States at the University of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois, in 1892. He was influential in the establishment of sociology as a valid field of academic study.

#2798

Magnus Hirschfeld

Magnus Hirschfeld

1868 - 1935 (67 years)

Magnus Hirschfeld was a German physician and sexologist. Hirschfeld was educated in philosophy, philology and medicine. An outspoken advocate for sexual minorities, Hirschfeld founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee and World League for Sexual Reform. He based his practice in Berlin-Charlottenburg during the Weimar period. Historian Dustin Goltz characterized the committee as having carried out "the first advocacy for homosexual and transgender rights". He is regarded as one of the most influential sexologists of the twentieth century.

#2799

Jane Addams

1860 - 1935 (75 years)

Laura Jane Addams was an American settlement activist, reformer, social worker, sociologist, public administrator, philosopher, and author. She was an important leader in the history of social work and women's suffrage in the United States. Addams co-founded Chicago's Hull House, one of America's most famous settlement houses, providing extensive social services to poor, largely immigrant families. In 1910, Addams was awarded an honorary Master of Arts degree from Yale University, becoming the first woman to receive an honorary degree from the school. In 1920, she was a co-founder of the Amer...

#2800

W. E. B. Du Bois

W. E. B. Du Bois

1868 - 1963 (95 years)

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was an American sociologist, socialist, historian, and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Du Bois grew up in a relatively tolerant and integrated community. After completing graduate work at the Friedrich Wilhelm University and Harvard University, where he was the first African American to earn a doctorate, he became a professor of history, sociology, and economics at Atlanta University. Du Bois was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions