Professor Sandy Isenstadt teaches the history of modern architecture, concentrating on developments in Europe and the United States, but including as well courses on the global spread of modernism. His writings span post-World War II reformulations of modernism by émigré architects such as Richard Neutra, Josep Lluis Sert, and Henry Klumb; visual polemics in the urban proposals of Leon Krier and Rem Koolhaas; and histories of refrigerators, picture windows, landscape views, electrification and urban lighting, the history of shopping, consumer design and marketing, real estate appraisal, and the work of various modern and contemporary architects.

His most recent book, Electric Light: An Architectural History (MIT Press, 2018) is the first sustained examination of the architectural spaces generated by the introduction of electric lighting. Earlier books include: The Modern American House: Spaciousness and Middle-Class Identity (Cambridge University Press, 2006), which won the Spiro Kostof Award from the Society of Architectural Historians for interdisciplinary studies of urban history, describes the visual enhancement of spaciousness in the architectural, interior, and landscape design of American domestic architecture; Modernism and the Middle East. Politics of the Built Environment, a set of edited essays published in 2008 by the University of Washington Press, is the first book-length treatment of modern architecture in the Middle East. Current projects include two co-edited books that look at the material culture of archives and modeling, a study of the ways in which marble became a modern material, and a history of the visual culture of American civil defense.

His work has been recognized with fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, in Washington, D.C. Before teaching architecture, he practiced architecture in Cambridge, Massachusetts.