Isaac Ariail Reed is Professor of Sociology and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. He is a historical sociologist and a social and political theorist with a particular interest in culture. His work in and on the human sciences articulates the social sciences with the humanities, with particular attention to transitions to modernity, state power, and the difference between power and authority. He is author of Interpretation and Social Knowledge: On the use of theory in the human sciences (2011) and Power in Modernity: Agency Relations and the Creative Destruction of the King’s Two Bodies (2020). He is the co-editor of Social Theory Now (2017) and The New Pragmatist Sociology (forthcoming).

Isaac received his B.A. in Mathematics and Sociology & Anthropology from Swarthmore College and his Ph.D. in Sociology from Yale University. In 2015, he received the Lewis Coser Award for Theoretical Agenda Setting in Sociology.