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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.

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List of the most influential people in Sociology,

#2901

Robert E. Park

1864 - 1944 (80 years)

Robert Ezra Park was an American urban sociologist who is considered to be one of the most influential figures in early U.S. sociology. Park was a pioneer in the field of sociology, changing it from a passive philosophical discipline to an active discipline rooted in the study of human behavior. He made significant contributions to the study of urban communities, race relations and the development of empirically grounded research methods, most notably participant observation in the field of criminology. From 1905 to 1914, Park worked with Booker T. Washington at the Tuskegee Institute. After...

#2902

Talcott Parsons

Talcott Parsons

1902 - 1979 (77 years)

Talcott Parsons was an American sociologist of the classical tradition, best known for his social action theory and structural functionalism. Parsons is considered one of the most influential figures in sociology in the 20th century. After earning a PhD in economics, he served on the faculty at Harvard University from 1927 to 1973. In 1930, he was among the first professors in its new sociology department. Later, he was instrumental in the establishment of the Department of Social Relations at Harvard.

#2903

Carl R. Fellers

Carl R. Fellers

1893 - 1960 (67 years)

Carl R. Fellers was an American food scientist and microbiologist who was involved in the pasteurization of dried foods and canning Atlantic blue crab. Early life and career A native of Hastings, New York, Fellers worked in research for the United States Department of Agriculture, the National Canners Association , and the University of Washington before joining the University of Massachusetts Amherst department of horticulture manufacturing on December 1, 1925.

#2904

Ellsworth Faris

1874 - 1953 (79 years)

Ellsworth Faris was an influential sociologist of the Chicago school. Faris was born in 1874 in Salem, Tennessee. He studied at Texas Christian University, where he earned his bachelor's degree in 1894 and master's degree in 1896. From 1897 to 1904, he spent time in Belgian Congo as a missionary. When he returned from Africa, Faris earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, and was hired into the department.

#2905

Kimball Young

1893 - 1972 (79 years)

Kimball Young was the president of the American Sociological Association in 1945. Young was the grandson of Brigham Young. He was born in Provo, Utah, and graduated from Brigham Young University in 1915. However, Kimball Young himself was not a believer in the Latter-day Saint faith, and spoke condescendingly of those who were. He then taught high school for a year in Arizona before going to study at the University of Chicago for sociology. His decision to study at Chicago was largely due to advice from William J. Snow. After studying there, he went to study at Stanford University, where he earned a Ph.D.

#2906

Rose Marie Pangborn

1932 - 1990 (58 years)

Rose Marie Valdes Pangborn was a Mexican-American food scientist, food technologist, professor, and a pioneer in the field of sensory analysis of food attributes. She worked as a sensory scientist in the Experiment Station, Step VIII, served for 35 years at the University of California, Davis. She co-founded the Association for Chemoreception Sciences , and the Sensory Reception Scholarship Fund .

#2907

Emory S. Bogardus

1882 - 1973 (91 years)

Emory Stephen Bogardus was a prominent figure in the history of American sociology. Bogardus founded one of the first sociology departments at an American university, at the University of Southern California in 1915.

#2908

Frank H. Hankins

1877 - 1970 (93 years)

Frank Hamilton Hankins was an American sociologist and anthropologist who was the president of the American Sociological Society in 1938. He wrote the book The Racial Basis of Civilization which was critical of racial theories such as Aryanism, Gobinism, Celticism, Anglo-Saxonism and Nordicism.

#2909

Fred W. Tanner

1888 - 1957 (69 years)

Fred Wilbur Tanner was an American food scientist and microbiologist who involved in the founding of the Institute of Food Technologists and the creation of the scientific journal Food Research . Academic career Tanner joined at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1923, where he was chair of the Bacteriology Department until 1948. His work focused on food safety issues, specifically pasteurization and meat curing. Tanner remained as professor until his retirement in 1956. Tanner's research in food science and technology would also lead to the establishment of the food technolo...

#2910

Fred C. Blanck

1881 - 1965 (84 years)

Fred C. Blanck was an American food scientist who was involved in the founding of the Institute of Food Technologists which was involved in the publishing of food and nutrition articles and books. IFT founding A charter member of IFT when it was founded in 1939, Blanck proposed at the last session of the meeting at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to have the new society dealing with food science in the United States be called the Institute of Food Technologists. He would serve as president of IFT in 1944-45 and would be named the first winner of the Stephen M. Babcock Award, now th...

#2911

Robert Staughton Lynd

1892 - 1970 (78 years)

Robert Staughton Lynd was an American sociologist and professor at Columbia University, New York City. He is best known for conducting the first Middletown studies of Muncie, Indiana, with his wife, Helen Lynd; as the coauthor of Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture and Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts ; and a pioneer in the use of social surveys. He was also the author of Knowledge for What? The Place of the Social Sciences in American Culture . In addition to writing and research, Lynd taught at Columbia from 1931 to 1960. He also served on U.S. gover...

#2912

Emil J. Walter

1897 - 1984 (87 years)

Emil Jakob Walter was a Swiss sociologist. Walter was professor at the Handelshochschule St. Gallen. As a positivist, Walter tried to apply the methods of natural science to sociological and psychological issues. Walter also wrote for scientific as well as social democratic periodicals .

#2913

Oliver Cox

1901 - 1974 (73 years)

Oliver Cromwell Cox was a Trinidadian-Americann sociologist. Cox was often misconceived as a Marxist due to his focus on class conflict and capitalism, however, Cox fundamentally disagreed with Marx's analysis of Capitalism. While Marx and other classical economists viewed foreign trade as trade in surpluses, Cox felt that foreign trade was the primary driving force in capitalist development. For Cox, capitalist systems were not isolated, but rather there was an interconnected network of global capitalist systems.

#2914

Howard W. Odum

1884 - 1954 (70 years)

Howard Washington Odum was an American sociologist and author who researched African-American life and folklore. Beginning in 1920, he served as a faculty member at the University of North Carolina, founding the university press, the journal Social Forces, and what is now the Howard W. Odum Institute for Research in Social Science, all in the 1920s. He also founded the university's School of Public Welfare, one of the first in the Southeast. With doctorates in psychology and sociology, he wrote extensively across academic disciplines, influencing several fields and publishing three novels in addition to 20 scholarly texts.

#2915

Robert Cooley Angell

1899 - 1984 (85 years)

Robert Cooley Angell was an American sociologist and educator. Committed to the advancement of rigorous social scientific research, Angell's work focussed on social integration and the pursuit of a more peaceful world order. Professor Angell enjoyed the highest honors which his discipline bestowed, presiding over both the American Sociological Society and the International Sociological Association . As a devoted educator, Angell was instrumental in developing the Honors Program at the University of Michigan, becoming its first director from 1957–1960.

#2916

Walter Reckless

1898 - 1988 (90 years)

Walter Reckless was an American criminologist known for his containment theory . Biography Reckless earned his PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago. While at the Chicago school, he joined with sociologists Robert Park and Ernest Burgess in conducting observation studies of crime in Chicago, Illinois. This research led to his dissertation, The Natural History of Vice Areas in Chicago , which was published as "Vice in Chicago" - a landmark sociological study of fraud, prostitution, and organized crime in the city's "vice" districts.

#2917

Frederic Thrasher

1892 - 1970 (78 years)

Frederic Milton Thrasher was a sociologist at the University of Chicago. He was a colleague of Robert E. Park and was one of the most prominent members of the Chicago School of Sociology in the 1920s.

#2918

Charles S. Johnson

Charles S. Johnson

1893 - 1956 (63 years)

Charles Spurgeon Johnson was an American sociologist and college administrator, the first black president of historically black Fisk University, and a lifelong advocate for racial equality and the advancement of civil rights for African Americans and all ethnic minorities. He preferred to work collaboratively with liberal white groups in the South, quietly as a "sideline activist," to get practical results.

#2919

Richard Thacker Morris

Richard Thacker Morris

1917 - 1981 (64 years)

Richard Thacker Morris was a professor of Sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles. He was the author of The Two-Way Mirror: National Status in Foreign Students' Adjustment , as well as The White Reaction Study , an important work on urban race relations.

#2920

Hans Speier

1905 - 1990 (85 years)

Hans Speier was a German-American sociologist who worked with the United States Government as a Germany expert both during and after World War II. He also published several books on German politics and culture throughout the middle half of the 20th century.

#2921

Peter Heintz

1920 - 1983 (63 years)

Peter René Heintz was a Swiss professor of sociology and doctor of political science that notably impacted on the extensive academic development within Latin America and greater Europe. Life Heintz was born on November 6, 1920, as the son of a merchant in Davos, Switzerland. After many years of adolescence in Spain and scientific studies in Paris, Cologne and Zurich, Heintz obtained his doctorate of Political Science in 1943 from the University of Zurich. While on campus, a chance encounter with German-born sociologist René König was particularly important for his interest in sociology, leadi...

#2922

Carey D. Miller

1895 - 1965 (70 years)

Carey Dunlap Miller was an American food scientist and a University of Hawaii at Manoa food and nutrition professor and department chair from 1922-1958. Early life and education Miller was born to immigrant parents that owned a ranch in Idaho. She graduated from Boise High School in 1912. She received her bachelor's degree with honors from the University of California, Berkeley and later her master's degree at Columbia University.

#2923

M. S. A. Rao

1926 - 1985 (59 years)

Madhugiri Shamarao Anathapadmanabha Rao was a professor of sociology who had been a founder-member in 1959 of the Department of Sociology at the University of Delhi, India. He wrote and edited extensively on subjects such as the social aspects of nutrition, both urban and rural sociology, the sociology of migration, and social dominance. He conducted much fieldwork as a part of his researches.

#2924

George Edmund Haynes

1881 - 1960 (79 years)

George Edmund Haynes was an American sociology scholar and federal civil servant, a co-founder and first executive director of the National Urban League, serving 1911 to 1918. A graduate of Fisk University, he earned a master's degree at Yale University, and was the first African American to earn a doctorate degree from Columbia University, where he completed one in sociology.

#2925

Carl F. Kraenzel

1906 - 1980 (74 years)

Carl Frederick Kraenzel was an American sociologist. Most of Kraenzel's work focuses on the people of the Great Plains, covering a range of topics including quality of life, power relations, resource use, and mental health. Kraenzel has been widely published in a variety of professional journals, monographs, research bulletins, special reports, and books in the fields of rural sociology, Great Plains sociology, and natural resource sociology. His best known work, The Great Plains in Transition, describes the challenges of social life and connections to the natural environments in the North American semiarid region located between the 98th meridian and the Rocky Mountains.

#2926

Ruth Glass

1912 - 1990 (78 years)

Ruth Glass was a German-born British sociologist, urban planner and founder of the Centre for Urban Studies at University College London . Life She was born in Berlin on 30 June 1912, the daughter of Eli Lazarus, who was Jewish, and Lilly Leszczynska. She left Germany in 1932, studying at the London School of Economics. After spending two years from 1941 at the Bureau of Applied Social Research of Columbia University, she returned to the United Kingdom in 1943. She concentrated on town planning and social planning.

#2927

Georges Davy

1883 - 1976 (93 years)

Georges Davy was a French sociologist. He was a student and disciple of Émile Durkheim. With Marcel Mauss and Paul Huvelin he pioneered anthropological studies of the origins of the idea of contract.

#2928

Valtazar Bogišić

Valtazar Bogišić

1834 - 1908 (74 years)

Valtazar Bogišić , also known as Baltazar Bogišić, was a Serbian jurist and a pioneer in sociology. In the domain of private law his most notable research was on family structure and the unique Montenegrin civil code of 1888. He is considered to be a pioneer in the sociology of law and sociological jurisprudence. He was also a follower of the German Historical School of law, and may be considered a transitional figure between the Historical School and sociological approaches to law. In 1902 Bogišić was elected president of the International Institute of Sociology in Paris.

#2929

Ulysses G. Weatherly

1865 - 1940 (75 years)

Ulysses Grant Weatherly Professor of Sociology at Indiana University and a founding member of the American Sociological Society, and on its executive committee from 1907 to 1910. He was appointed as vice president in 1920 and President in 1923.

#2930

Gabriel Le Bras

1891 - 1970 (79 years)

Gabriel Le Bras was a French legal scholar and sociologist. Early life Gabriel Le Bras was born on July 23, 1891, in Paimpol, France. He received a Doctorate and the Agrégation in Laws in 1922. Career Le Bras was a Professor of Law at the University of Strasbourg from 1923 to 1929. He was director of research in the Sociology of Religion at the École pratique des hautes études from 1945 to 1962. He served as the Dean of the Law School at the University of Paris from 1959 to 1962.

#2931

Robert McKenzie

Robert McKenzie

1917 - 1981 (64 years)

Robert Trelford McKenzie was a Canadian professor of politics and sociology, and a psephologist . He is perhaps best known in Britain as one of the main presenters of the BBC's General Election programmes.

#2932

John L. Gillin

1871 - 1958 (87 years)

John Lewis Gillin was an American sociologist, specializing in applied sociology, and the 16th president of the American Sociological Association . He was also active in the activities of the American Red Cross.

#2933

Minnie Louise Haskins

Minnie Louise Haskins

1875 - 1957 (82 years)

Minnie Louise Haskins was a British poet and an academic in the field of sociology, best known for being quoted by King George VI in his Royal Christmas Message of 1939. Early life Haskins was born at 2 Kingswood Hill, Oldland, South Gloucestershire, six miles east of Bristol, and she grew up in the neighbouring village of Warmley. Her father was Joseph Haskins, a grocer, and her mother was Louisa Bridges. Her father acquired a pottery at Warmley making drain pipes, which was continued after his death by her mother. The family lived at Warmley House.

#2934

Lewis Wade Jones

1910 - 1979 (69 years)

Lewis Wade Jones was a sociologist and teacher. He was born in Cuero, Texas, the son of Wade E. and Lucynthia McDade Jones. A member of the Omega Psi Phi fraternity, he received his AB degree from Fisk University in 1931, and followed it with postgraduate study as a Social Science Research Council Fellow at the University of Chicago in 1931–1932.

#2935

Charles A. Ellwood

1873 - 1946 (73 years)

Charles Abram Ellwood was one of the leading American sociologists of the interwar period, studying intolerance, communication and revolutions and using many multidisciplinary methods. He argued that sociology should play a role in directing cultural evolution through education of society.

#2936

F. Stuart Chapin

1888 - 1974 (86 years)

Francis Stuart Chapin was an American sociologist and educator; he was a professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota from 1922 to 1953. Background He received his bachelor's degree from Columbia University in 1909, as well as his PhD from the same school in 1911.

#2937

A.K. Nazmul Karim

1922 - 1982 (60 years)

Abul Khair Nazmul Karim was a Bangladeshi sociologist and academic. He was posthumously awarded Ekushey Padak for his contribution to education by the government of Bangladesh in 2012. Personal life Karim was born in the Noakhali/Comilla area, now known as Lakshmipur. His parental residence was at Falgoonkora village in the Comilla District. He was the seventh of eight children of Abu Rashid Nizamuddin Mahmood Ahmed and Mossammat Shamsun Neda Khatun. He came from an educated family of school inspectors, private tutors, diwans, and magistrates. His mother came from a zamindari family.

#2938

William Z. Ripley

1867 - 1941 (74 years)

William Zebina Ripley was an American economist, lecturer at Columbia University, professor of economics at MIT, professor of political economy at Harvard University, and racial anthropologist. Ripley was famous for his criticisms of American railroad economics and American business practices in the 1920s and 1930s, and later for his tripartite racial theory of Europe. His work of racial anthropology was later taken up by racial physical anthropologists, eugenicists, white supremacists, Nordicists, and racists in general, and it was considered a valid academic work at the time, although today...

#2939

Muriel Rukeyser

Muriel Rukeyser

1913 - 1980 (67 years)

Muriel Rukeyser was an American poet, essayist, biographer, and political activist. She wrote poems about equality, feminism, social justice, and Judaism. Kenneth Rexroth said that she was the greatest poet of her "exact generation".

#2940

Achille Ouy

1889 - 1959 (70 years)

Achille Ouy was a French philosopher and sociologist. Ouy taught philosophy at various lycees, and was involved with the Mercure de France. "A follower of René Worms and Gaston Richard, Ouy "performed many day-to-day tasks that held the R.I.S. and IIS together from 1919 to 1940."

#2941

Gunnar Landtman

1878 - 1940 (62 years)

Gunnar Landtman was a Finnish philosopher as well as a sociology and philosophy professor. A pupil of Edvard Westermarck, he graduated from the University of Helsinki in 1905. He later became an associate professor there from 1910 to 1927 and then a temporary professor until his death in 1940. At the university, Landtman was a member of the Prometheus Society, a student society promoting freedom of religion. Landtman was the first modern sociological anthropologist. His most important journey was a two-year trip to Papua New Guinea where he lived with the Kiwai Papuans from 1910 to 1912. He w...

#2942

Olgerd Bochkovsky

Olgerd Bochkovsky

1885 - 1939 (54 years)

Olgerd Ipolyt Bochkovsky – Ukrainian sociologist, journalist, diplomat and political activist whose political writings were published in Ukrainian newspapers in Canada, Czechoslovakia, Poland and other countries. His selected writings have recently appeared in a three-volume edition. Born in a Polish-Lithuanian family in Dolynska village, Kherson Gubernia , he studied in St. Petersburg, where he was involved in the socialist movement. After the revolution in 1905 he emigrated to Austro-Hungary and settled in Prague. In 1909 he graduated from Charles University . At that time he was involved i...

#2943

Viola Klein

1908 - 1973 (65 years)

Viola Klein was a sociologist in Great Britain. Her work demonstrated that objective ideas about women's attributes are socially constructed. Although her early training was in psychology and philosophy, her most prolific research engagements concerned women's social roles and how these changed after the Industrial Revolution. She was one of the first scholars to bring quantitative evidence to bear on this socio-economic topic. Her research not only illuminated the changing roles of women in society, but she also wrote and lectured on concrete social and political changes that would help faci...

#2944

Annie Marion MacLean

1869 - 1934 (65 years)

Annie Marion MacLean was a pioneering American sociologist of the women's Chicago School, and is sometimes referred to as the "mother of contemporary ethnography". She was one of the first women to pursue a professional career in sociology.

#2945

Yasuma Takada

1883 - 1972 (89 years)

Yasuma Takata was an influential sociologist and economist and is most widely known for his power theory of economics. A fruit - the Yasuma - was named after him after he discovered it on one of his many trips to Greece.

#2946

Lawrence D. Bobo

Lawrence D. Bobo

1900 - Present (126 years)

Lawrence D. Bobo is the W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences and the Dean of Social Science at Harvard University. His research focuses on the intersection of social psychology, social inequality, politics, and race.

#2947

Georges Gurvitch

Georges Gurvitch

1894 - 1965 (71 years)

Georges Gurvitch was a Russian-born French sociologist and jurist. One of the leading sociologists of his times, he was a specialist of the sociology of knowledge. In 1944 he founded the journal Cahiers internationaux de Sociologie. He held a chair in sociology at the Sorbonne in Paris. An outspoken advocate of Algerian decolonization, Gurvitch and his wife were the victim of terrorist attack by the far-right nationalist group, L'O.A.S on June 22, 1962. Their apartment was destroyed by a bomb, and they took refuge for a time at the house of painter Marc Chagall.

#2948

E. Wight Bakke

1903 - 1971 (68 years)

Edward Wight Bakke was an American sociology and economics professor at Yale University who achieved prominence in the field of industrial relations. He was a Sterling Professor, Yale's highest level of academic rank, and served as director of the Yale Labor and Management Center from its founding in 1945 until its dissolution in the late 1950s. The author, co-author, or co-editor of thirteen books, Bakke made major contributions to the study of unemployment and organizational theory.

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