Tal Arbel is a Ph.D. Candidate in History of Science at Harvard University and currently a Visiting Scholar in the Department of History at Columbia University. She graduated from Tel Aviv University in 2007 with an MA in European intellectual history, and for the last three years served on Harvard's Committee on Degrees in Social Studies, teaching modern social theory. Specialized in the twentieth century history of the social and behavioral sciences, her doctoral dissertation examines the rise to prominence of interdisciplinary institutes for applied social research in postwar American academia, and the subsequent migration of this scientific culture to the postcolonial areas. A particular emphasis is placed on the troubled localization of survey and other psycho-social probing methods in 1950s nation-building projects, such as military development and immigrant assimilation, as well as on the newly global career of the social scientific expert. Before coming to Harvard, she worked as a media critic for The Seventh Eye Journal and was a regular contributor to Ha'aretz Books.