Isenberg is the author, most recently, of We’ll Always Have ‘Casablanca’: The Life, Legend, and Afterlife of Hollywood’s Most Beloved Movie (W.W. Norton, 2017; Faber & Faber, 2017), which was a Los Angeles Times bestseller and also named an Editor’s Choice by the New York Times Book Review. His work been translated into numerous languages, including Hungarian, Russian, Greek, and Spanish. Among his other books are: Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins (California, 2014), which was selected by Huffington Post as a Best Film Book of 2014; Detour (British Film Institute, 2008), a book-length study of Ulmer’s acclaimed low-budget film noir; and, as editor, Weimar Cinema: An Essential Guide to Classic Films of the Era (Columbia, 2009), which was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. His current projects include a book on Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot for Norton and Faber and a short interpretive biography of Wilder for the Yale Jewish Lives series. The anthology, Billy Wilder on Assignment: Dispatches from Weimar Berlin and Interwar Vienna, which he edited and introduced, is due out from Princeton in April 2021. He co-edited a dossier on German-language film criticism for New German Critique, due out in fall 2020.

In support of his work, Isenberg has been awarded grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Commission, the International Research Center for Cultural Studies in Vienna, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He served for seven years as book review editor of Film Quarterly and is currently a member of its editorial board. He is a standing fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities, and in 2015-2016 was awarded an inaugural NEH Public Scholar research grant. His writing has appeared in such diverse publications as The Nation, The New Republic, The Daily Beast, Salon, the Times Literary Supplement, Bookforum, New York Review of Books Daily, The Paris Review Daily, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Criterion Collection, Film Comment, Film Quarterly, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times Book Review.