Isaac Ariail Reed is Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia. He is a historical and cultural sociologist with particular interests in the philosophy of social science, the historical origins of American modernity and the development of the American state, and the social theory of power. His work began with studies of the Salem Witch Trials and hermeneutic sociology, and expanded into a study of interpretation and explanation in the human sciences, and then to the sociology of power and transitions to modernity.