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,
#301
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
#9051
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva is an American sociologist and professor of sociology at Duke University. He was the 2018 president of the American Sociological Association. Early influences Bonilla-Silva was educated in Puerto Rico where he double majored in Sociology and Economics. In his work White Supremacy and Racism in the Post-civil Rights Era, he says that "Myriam Muniz, Arturo Torrecillas, Carlos Buitrago, Juan Jose Baldrich, Carlos Ramos [...] shaped my sociological imagination." Bonilla-Silva has stated that Jose A. Padin and Charles Camic were two mentors that influenced his development as ...
Go to Profile#302
Helmut Anheier
#20915
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Helmut K. Anheier is a German-American academic. He is professor of sociology and past president of the Hertie School in Berlin. Until September 2019 he held a chair at the Max Weber Institute of Sociology, Heidelberg University, where he was also the Academic Director of the Center for Social Investment and Innovation. His research interests include civil society, social innovation, organizational theory, governance and policy research, social science methodology, including indicator models
Go to Profile#303
Iván Szelényi
#18983
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Iván Szelényi is a noted Hungarian-American sociologist, as of 2010 the Dean of Social Sciences at New York University Abu Dhabi. Biography He is the son of Gusztáv Szelényi, an entomologist and Julianna Csapó.
Go to Profile#304
Judy Wajcman
#7704
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Judy Wajcman, is the Anthony Giddens Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is the Principal Investigator of the Women in Data Science and AI project at The Alan Turing Institute. She is also a visiting professor at the Oxford Internet Institute. Her scholarly interests encompass the sociology of work, science and technology studies, gender theory, and organizational analysis. Her work has been translated into French, German, Greek, Italian, Korean, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese and Spanish. Prior to joining the LSE in 2009, she was a Professor of Sociology in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University.
Go to Profile#305
Wendell Bell
#16524
Overall Influence
1924 - 2019 (95 years)
Wendell Bell was a futurist and Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Yale University. His areas of specialization included sociology, social class, race, family life and future studies. Early career During World War II, Bell was a naval aviator and served in the Philippines.
Go to Profile#306
Renée Fox
#14899
Overall Influence
1928 - 2020 (92 years)
Renée Claire Fox was an American sociologist. She was a summa cum laude graduate of Smith College in 1949, earned her Ph.D. in Sociology in 1954 from Radcliffe College, Harvard University, where she studied in the Department of Social Relations. Renée Fox’s major teaching and research interests – sociology of medicine, medical research, medical education, and medical ethics – involved her in first-hand, participant observation-based studies in Continental Europe , in Central Africa , and in the People’s Republic of China, as well as in the United States. She lectured in colleges, universities...
Go to Profile#307
Eric Klinenberg
#19377
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Eric M. Klinenberg is an American sociologist and a scholar of urban studies, culture, and media. He is currently Helen Gould Shepard Professor in Social Science and Director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. Klinenberg is best known for his contributions as a public sociologist.
Go to Profile#308
Jack Barbalet
#27944
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Jack Barbalet is an Australian sociologist. Since 2017 he has been professor of sociology at the Australian Catholic University. He was previously Chair Professor and Head of the Department of Sociology at Hong Kong Baptist University. He has held appointments at the University of Papua New Guinea, the University of Adelaide, and the Australian National University. He was professor of sociology at the University of Leicester, where he was head of department, and subsequently professorial fellow in the Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy at the University of Western Sydney.
Go to Profile#309
Rogers Brubaker
#9119
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Rogers Brubaker is professor of sociology at University of California, Los Angeles and UCLA Foundation Chair. He has written academic works on social theory, immigration, citizenship, nationalism, ethnicity, religion, diasporas, gender, populism, and digital hyperconnectivity.
Go to Profile#310
Erich Goode
#31241
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Erich Goode is an American sociologist specializing in the sociology of deviance. He has written a number of books on the field in general, as well as on specific deviant topics. He was a professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
Go to Profile#311
Peter Bearman
#11501
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
#312
Neil Gross
#9413
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Neil Louis Gross is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Sociology and chair of the department of sociology at Colby College. He is also a visiting scholar of New York University’s Institute for Public Knowledge. He has written several books on sociological and political topics, and also blogs for The Chronicle of Higher Education. Gross edited the American Sociological Association's journal Sociological Theory from 2009 to 2015. He previously taught at the University of Southern California, Harvard University, Princeton University, and at the University of British Columbia.
Go to Profile#313
Steve Fuller
#8636
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Steve William Fuller is an American social philosopher in the field of science and technology studies. He has published in the areas of social epistemology, academic freedom, and the subjects of intelligent design and transhumanism.
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Elizabeth S. Anderson
#3004
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Elizabeth Secor Anderson is an American philosopher. She is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan and specializes in political philosophy, ethics, and feminist philosophy.
Go to Profile#315
Jaber F. Gubrium
#8918
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Jaber Fandy "Jay" Gubrium is an American sociologist and social psychologist. His research perspective is the narrative ethnography of caregiving, especially care constructed in organizational context. Now retired, he is professor emeritus in the University of Missouri Department of Sociology. Previously, he was professor of sociology at the University of Florida, 1987-2002, and before that professor of sociology at Marquette University, 1970-1987. He received a PhD honoris causa at Lund University, Sweden, in 2017. Over the years, through a variety of field studies and along with colleagues D...
Go to Profile#316
E. Digby Baltzell
#13550
Overall Influence
1915 - 1996 (81 years)
Edward Digby Baltzell Jr. was an American sociologist, academic and author. He studied the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment and is credited with popularizing the acronym WASP. He was also a best-selling author whose books were popular with both scholars and the general public.
Go to Profile#317
Hamid Dabashi
#1212
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Hamid Dabashi is an Iranian-American professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York City. He is the author of over twenty books. Among them are Theology of Discontent, several books on Iranian cinema, Staging a Revolution, the edited volume Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema, and his one-volume analysis of Iranian history, Iran: A People Interrupted.
Go to Profile#318
Coretta Scott King
#145
Overall Influence
1927 - 2006 (79 years)
Coretta Scott King was an American author, activist, and civil rights leader and the wife of Martin Luther King Jr. from 1953 until his death. As an advocate for African-American equality, she was a leader for the civil rights movement in the 1960s. King was also a singer who often incorporated music into her civil rights work. King met her husband while attending graduate school in Boston. They both became increasingly active in the American civil rights movement.
Go to Profile#319
Peter Beilharz
#30659
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Peter Beilharz is an Australian sociologist. He is professor of critical theory at Sichuan University, Chengdu, PRC. Previously he was professor of sociology and remains Emeritus Professor at La Trobe University, Melbourne . He is adjunct professor at Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia. Beilharz is founding editor of the international journal of social theory Thesis Eleven published by Sage.
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Lonnie Athens
#11870
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
#321
Vron Ware
#23371
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Vron Ware is a British academic and visiting professor at the Gender Institute of the London School of Economics and Political Science. She was previously a Professor at Kingston University, editor of Searchlight magazine from 1981 to 1983, and worked as a freelance journalist until 1987, when she co-founded the Women's Design Service. She taught cultural geography at the University of Greenwich from 1992 to 1999, sociology and gender studies at Yale University from 1999 to 2005, and was senior research fellow at the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change at the Open University from 2008...
Go to Profile#322
Simon Frith
#2610
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Simon Webster Frith is a British sociomusicologist and former rock critic who specializes in popular music culture. He is Professor Emeritus of Music at University of Edinburgh. Career As a student, he read PPE at Oxford and earned a doctorate in sociology from UC Berkeley. He is the author of many influential books, including The Sociology of Rock , Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure and the Politics of Rock 'n' Roll , Art into Pop , Music for Pleasure: Essays on the Sociology of Pop , and Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music . He has also co-edited key anthologies in the interdiscip...
Go to Profile#323
Michael Omi
#12494
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Michael Omi is an American sociologist, writer, scholar, and educator. Omi has served on the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the Associate Director of the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society. Omi is best known for developing the theory of racial formation along with Howard Winant. Omi's work includes race theory, Asian American studies, and antiracist scholarship.
Go to Profile#324
Mohammad Fazeli
#33949
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Mohammad Fazeli is an Iranian sociologist and former assistant professor at Shahid Beheshti University whose work focuses on social impact assessment, political sociology and sociology of science. He got fired from university in the "third wave of purging political professors". He is advisor to Iranian Minister of Energy. Fazeli was the research deputy of Iranian Center for Strategic Studies and the general editor of the Network for Public Policy Studies .
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Jean Baubérot
#17190
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Jean Baubérot , is a French historian and sociologist specializing in sociology of religions. He is the founder of the sociology of secularism. After holding the chair of "History and Sociology of Protestantism" , he held the chair of "History and Sociology of secularism " at the École pratique des hautes études, where he was the honorary president. He wrote twenty books, including a historical novel. He is coauthor of the Déclaration internationale sur la laïcité, signed by 250 scholars from 30 countries.
Go to Profile#326
David Matza
#7566
Overall Influence
1930 - 2018 (88 years)
David Matza was an American sociologist who taught at University of California, Berkeley from 1961. Life and Work Born in New York, he received his PhD from Princeton University in 1959. His research fields included deviant behavior, social change, poverty and working class life. He is best known for coauthoring, with Gresham Sykes, techniques of neutralization.
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Lauren Berlant
#7123
Overall Influence
1957 - 2021 (64 years)
Lauren Gail Berlant was an American scholar, cultural theorist, and author who is regarded as "one of the most esteemed and influential literary and cultural critics in the United States." Berlant was the George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor of English at the University of Chicago, where they taught from 1984 until 2021. Berlant wrote and taught issues of intimacy and belonging in popular culture, in relation to the history and fantasy of citizenship.
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Frank Furedi
#6055
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Frank Furedi is a Hungarian-Canadian academic and emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent. He is well known for his work on sociology of fear, education, therapy culture, paranoid parenting and sociology of knowledge.
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Mirra Komarovsky
#21905
Overall Influence
1905 - 1999 (94 years)
Mirra Komarovsky , was an American pioneer in the sociology of gender. Early years Born to Mendel and Anna Komarovsky in a privileged Jewish family in the Russian Empire, her family fled the country after the 1917 Russian Revolution. Komarovsky's parents were Zionists and landowning Jews in Akkerman, Russia, until tsarist police drove them from their home. They moved initially to Baku and then to Wichita, Kansas after the Bolshevik Revolution, when Mirra was 16. In Baku, Komarovsky lived a solidly middle-class lifestyle; she was homeschooled by private tutors and learned Russian, English, H...
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Amos Hawley
#28170
Overall Influence
1910 - 2009 (99 years)
Amos Henry Hawley was an American sociologist. Hawley studied extensively how human populations interacted with their changing environments along with the growth of populations. He focused his studies on the behavior of populations in terms of organization, development, and change over space and time.
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Robert Chambers
#19041
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Robert John Haylock Chambers OBE is a British academic and development practitioner. He spent his academic career at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex. In 2013 he became an honorary fellow of the International Institute of Social Studies.
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Dennis Wrong
#18280
Overall Influence
1923 - 2018 (95 years)
Dennis Hume Wrong was a Canadian-born American sociologist and emeritus professor in the Department of Sociology at New York University. Wrong was the author of several books, including two essay collections containing articles first published in cultural, intellectual, political and scholarly journals in the United States, Canada, and Britain.
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Stanley Wasserman
#24210
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Stanley Wasserman is an American statistician and prior to retirement was the Rudy Professor of Statistics, Psychology, and Sociology at Indiana University Bloomington and the Academic Supervisor of the International laboratory for Applied Network Research at Moscow's National Research University – Higher School of Economics . He is known for his work on social network analysis, mathematical sociology, network science and multidimensional network. In 2017 Wasserman launched the Master's program 'Applied statistics with Network Analysis' at National Research University – Higher School of Econo...
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Thích Nhất Hạnh
#508
Overall Influence
1926 - 2022 (96 years)
Thích Nhất Hạnh was a Vietnamese Thiền Buddhist monk, peace activist, prolific author, poet and teacher, who founded the Plum Village Tradition, historically recognized as the main inspiration for engaged Buddhism. Known as the "father of mindfulness", Nhất Hạnh was a major influence on Western practices of Buddhism.
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Charles Murray
#831
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Charles Alan Murray is an American political scientist. He is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C. Murray's work is highly controversial. His book Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980 discussed the American welfare system. In the book The Bell Curve , he and co-author Richard Herrnstein argue that in 20th century American society, intelligence became a better predictor than parental socioeconomic status or education level of many individual outcomes, including income, job performance, pregnancy out of wedlock, ...
Go to Profile#336
Leopoldina Fortunati
#24291
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Leopoldina Fortunati is an Italian feminist, theorist, and author. Her influences include Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Antonio Negri, and Karl Marx. Work She is the author of The Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, Prostitution, Labor and Capital , a feminist critique of Marx.
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Eviatar Zerubavel
#29063
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Eviatar Zerubavel is professor of sociology at Rutgers University, a specialist in the sociology of cognition and everyday life, including topics such as time, boundaries, and categorization. Biography Zerubavel is a grandson of Ya'akov Zerubavel. Born in Israel in 1948 to parents in diplomatic service, he spent much of his childhood abroad. He studied first at the University of Tel Aviv and then received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1976, where he studied under Erving Goffman. After teaching at Columbia University and the State University of New York at Stony Brook, he has spent the bulk of his career at Rutgers University.
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Rakesh Khurana
#11342
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Rakesh Khurana is an Indian-American educator. He is a Professor of Sociology at Harvard University, Professor of Leadership Development at Harvard Business School and the Dean of Harvard College. Early life and education Khurana was born in India and was raised in Queens, New York. He received his bachelor's degree in industrial relations from Cornell, his AM in sociology from Harvard, and his PhD in organizational behavior through a joint program between the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Harvard Business School in 1998.
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Luciano Gallino
#41695
Overall Influence
1927 - 2015 (88 years)
Luciano Gallino was an Italian sociologist. Born in Turin, between 1956 and 1971 he worked in the Research Department of Social Relations of Olivetti. He was instrumental in introducing Sociology into Italian universities, at a time when both spiritualist and Communist scholars regarded the discipline as largely irrelevant.
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Michael Quinn Patton
#17704
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Michael Quinn Patton is an independent organizational development and program evaluation consultant, and former president of the American Evaluation Association. He is the founder and director of Utilization-Focused Evaluation.
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Gabriele Rosenthal
#20793
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Gabriele Rosenthal is a German sociologist and head of Department for Qualitative Methods of the Center for Methods in Social Sciences of the University of Göttingen, Germany. Rosenthal is recognized for the introduction of the method of biographical case reconstruction using biographical narrative interviews . She is known for systemizing the influences of the Gestalt theory , the sociology of knowledge , and the sociology of figurations and processes to explain the interrelationship between experience, memory and narrative, as well as how social figurations intertwine with individual biog...
Go to Profile#342
Andrew Sayer
#10220
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Andrew Sayer is Emeritus Professor of Social Theory and Political Economy at Lancaster University, UK. He is known for significant contributions to methodology and theory in the social sciences. Education Andrew Sayer studied a BA in Geography at Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology in the late 1960s, and then did an MA and D.Phil. in Urban and Regional Studies at Sussex University in the early 1970s. He was lecturer in the School of Social Sciences at Sussex until he moved to a lectureship at Lancaster University in 1993. Although affiliated with sociology, he has affinities with...
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David C. Stark
#23893
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
David Charles Stark is Arthur Lehman Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, where he served as chair of the sociology department and currently directs the Center on Organizational Innovation. He was formerly an External Faculty Member of the Santa Fe Institute. He is well-cited in the fields of economic sociology, social networks, science and technology studies, and social change and development.
Go to Profile#344
Jörg Blasius
#37131
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Jörg Blasius is a German sociologist, and Professor at the Institute of Political Science and Sociology of the University of Bonn. He became known through his earlier work on correspondence analysis in the social sciences.
Go to Profile#345
Stephen Ball
#33117
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Stephen John Ball, is a British sociologist and the Karl Mannheim Professor of Sociology of Education at the Institute of Education of University College London . He has been described as "one of the most eminent scholars in the field of education policy". In 2013, Michael W. Apple wrote that "...one of the things that set Stephen Ball apart from many others is his insistence that both structural and poststructural theories and analyses are necessary for ‘bearing witness’ and for an adequate critical understanding of educational realities". He is the co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Educ...
Go to Profile#346
Pamela E. Oliver
#21143
Overall Influence
Pamela E. Oliver is an American sociologist most well-known for her contributions to theories of social action and her studies of racial injustice in the legal system. She is a Conway-Bascom Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Go to Profile#347
Risto Alapuro
#27068
Overall Influence
1944 - 2022 (78 years)
Risto Sakari Alapuro was a Finnish sociologist. Alapuro was born in Ruokolahti on 28 April 1944. Alapuro was a professor of sociology at University of Jyväskylä between 1986 and 1991, and a professor at Helsinki University from 1991 to 2010.
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Anthony D. Smith
#8064
Overall Influence
1939 - 2016 (77 years)
Anthony David Stephen Smith was a British historical sociologist who, at the time of his death, was Professor Emeritus of Nationalism and Ethnicity at the London School of Economics. He is considered one of the founders of the interdisciplinary field of nationalism studies.
Go to Profile#349
Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein
#57142
Overall Influence
#350
Marta Harnecker
#8318
Overall Influence
1937 - 2019 (82 years)
Marta Harnecker was a Chilean journalist, author, psychologist, sociologist, and Marxist intellectual. She studied the analysis of labor movements and acted as an advisor to the government of Cuba, and worked with left-wing political movements within Latin America. She was active in the government of Salvador Allende between 1970 and 1973, and provided advice to Hugo Chávez between 2004 and 2011.
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