Jeff is a doctoral student in the Department of Geography at the University of Kentucky. His research investigates productions of political Islam and the state within spaces of geopolitical and geoeconomic organization. His dissertation project explores what it means to be a “Muslim Democrat” in Turkey. Jeff grew up in a small town in southern Virginia and started his academic career at Virginia Tech. While pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering, he also explored a range of personal interests, taking extra courses in world politics, classical Greek and Roman history, and creative writing. The material in these courses and the experiences of a semester spent living in Europe during NATO’s military offensive in Kosovo spurred him to consider exchanging a career in engineering for one of researching and teaching about large scale political conflict. After finishing his degree, he spent a year traveling and trying to write a novel before deciding to enter the master’s program in Geography at UK during the fall of 2001.