U.S. sociologist and educator who did much to establish the fields of sociology of knowledge and sociology of education.

Waller was raised in a rural Midwestern town, where his father was a school superintendent. He was graduated from the University of Illinois in 1920 and did graduate work in sociology at the University of Chicago, receiving his M.A. in 1925. He completed his graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was awarded the Ph.D. in 1929 for his iconoclastic dissertation The Old Love and the New, dealing with case studies of divorce (published 1930).

From 1929 to 1931 Waller was an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska, collecting there most of the material for his classic The Sociology of Teaching (1932). From 1931 to 1937 he was professor of sociology at Pennsylvania State College and from 1937 to 1945 associate professor of sociology at Barnard College, Columbia University. His book The Family: A Dynamic Interpretation (1938), a study in the social psychology of interaction, added to his scholarly reputation.

In 1940 Waller published War in the Twentieth Century, his first attempt to apply sociology to a whole society rather than to a single institution such as divorce, education, or the family. Succeeding books were War and the Family (1940) and The Veteran Comes Back (1944).