Isaac Ariail Reed is Thomas C. Sorensen Professor of Political and Social Thought and Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture in Charlottesville, Virginia. His work began with studies of the Salem Witch Trials and hermeneutic sociology, expanded into a study of interpretation and explanation in the human sciences, and then to the sociology of power and transitions to modernity. He has written about the Whiskey Rebellion, Bacon’s Rebellion, the French Revolution, the Cold War, science fiction, the idea of the human sciences, and the intellectual history of political and social theory. At the core of his work are three ideas: (1) transitions to modernity transformed social and political life; (2) signification is a source of immense variation in history and society, because it is a fundamental component of action, motivation, and performance; and (3) social structure may be usefully conceptualized as hierarchical networks of agency relations. He graduated with a B.A. in Mathematics and Sociology & Anthropology from Swarthmore College in 2000. In 2007, he earned his Ph.D. in Sociology from Yale University. He is the author of Interpretation and Social Knowledge: On the use of theory in the human sciences (2011), Power in Modernity: Agency Relations and the Creative Destruction of the King’s Two Bodies (2020), and Sociology as a Human Science: Essays on Interpretation and Causal Pluralism (2023), and the co-editor of Social Theory Now (2017) and The New Pragmatist Sociology: Inquiry, Agency, and Democracy (2022).
