Born in Devon and raised there and in the Netherlands, Joel Isaac trained as an historian at Royal Holloway, University of London, and at Trinity College, Cambridge.  From 2005 until 2007, Dr Isaac 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.  Dr Isaac's research focuses on the history of social and political thought in the United States, especially the development of the human sciences during the twentieth century.   His first monograph, Knowledge By Design: Crafting the Human Sciences in Modern America, is forthcoming in 2012 from Harvard University Press.  His current research centres on the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and his impact on social and political thought from the mid-twentieth-century to the present.