Isaac is a PhD candidate in the Department of English SUNY Buffalo. He earned his BA and MA in English from Arizona State University. His writing appears in American Literature, American Literary Realism, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, Commonplace, and elsewhere. Isaac's dissertation traces the influence of abolitionism on American literature from 1852-1901, showing how the realist novel's growing status as a prestigious literary genre was tied to its repudiation of radical abolitionist rhetoric.