Joel Isaac

Joel Isaac was born in Devon and raised there and in the Netherlands.  He trained as an historian at Royal Holloway, University of London, and at Trinity College, Cambridge.  From 2005 until 2007, he held the Keasbey Research Fellowship in American Studies at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He took up a lectureship at Queen Mary, University of London in 2007, and remained there until assuming his current post in the Faculty of History.  In 2011 Isaac held the Balzan-Skinner Lectureship in Modern Intellectual History.

His major publications include Working Knowledge: Making the Human Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn (2012); "Missing Links: W. V. Quine, the Making of 'Two Dogmas,' and the Analytic Roots of Postanalytic Philosophy," History of European Ideas (2011); "Tool Shock: Technique and Epistemology in the Postwar Social Sciences," History of Political Economy (2010); "Theorist at Work: Talcott Parsons and the Carnegie Project on Theory, 1949-1951," Journal of the History of Ideas (2010); "Tangled Loops: Theory, History and the Human Sciences in Modern America," Modern Intellectual History (2009); "The Human Sciences in Cold War America," Historical Journal (2007); and "W. V. Quine and the Origins of Analytic Philosophy in the United States," Modern Intellectual History (2005).