Joel Isaac Named McKeon Center Director

Joel Isaac, Associate Professor in the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought has been named faculty director of the McKeon Center. Dean of the College Melina Hale made the announcement on Friday, June 27, 2025.

The Center, which moved to the College last year, honors the legacy of the renowned University of Chicago philosopher, Professor Richard McKeon. Isaac will direct the Center’s strategic efforts to further McKeon’s methodological framework, fostering a systematic approach to analytical inquiry.

His research centers on the history of modern philosophy and the social sciences. He recently completed a book-length study of the relations between philosophy and the social sciences in the 20th century. His next project, under contract with Penguin, UK, is a study of the political foundations of economic thought, with special attention paid to the origins of neoclassical economics. His first book, Working Knowledge: Making the Human Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn (Harvard, 2012), won the Gladstone Prize of the Royal Historical Society. He is the co-editor of States of Exception in American History(Chicago, 2020), The Worlds of American Intellectual History (Oxford, 2017) and Uncertain Empire: American History and the Idea of the Cold War (2012). Since joining the University in 2017, he has taught regularly in the Social Sciences Core and in the Law, Letters, and Society program.