Bettina Koch is Associate Professor of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. She has published widely on political theory and the history of Western and non-Western political thought. Her work focuses on issues related to the interaction of politics and religion, political violence in transcultural comparison, the concept of terrorism as a topic in political theory, state decline and failure, mass surveillance, and state terrorism. Her most recent monograph is Patterns Legitimizing Political Violence in Transcultural Perspectives: Islamic and Christian Traditions and Legacies (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2015; paperback 2016). She is editor of the volume State Terror, State Violence – Global Perspectives (Springer: Wiesbaden, 2016) and co-editor (with Cary J. Nederman) of Inventing Modernity in Medieval European Thought, c. 1100 – c. 1550 (Medieval Institute Publications, 2018). In 2016/17 she was Caltech-Huntington Humanities Collaborations Fellow, California Institute of Technology and Huntington Library and Caltech Visiting Associate in the Humanities, California Institute of Technology.