In States of Terror (University of Chicago Press, March 2019) English Professor David Simpson examines how we have come to use the terms "terror" and "terrorism" to cover a wide range of violent acts, tracking the concept’s long, complicated history across literature, philosophy, political science and theology.

Professor Simpson joined the faculty of UC Davis in 1997, as the G.B. Needham Fellow; he received the G. B. Needham Endowed Chair in English in 2008. Previously he taught at Columbia, University of Colorado, Northwestern University, and Cambridge. His areas of research and teaching are Romanticism and literary theory. He is a member of the editorial board of Cambridge Studies in Romanticism and of Modern Language Quarterly. He is the author of numerous books, including Situatedness; or Why we Keep Saying Where We're Coming From (Duke U P, 2002), 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration (U of Chicago P, 2006); Wordsworth, Commodification, and Social Concern: The Poetics of Modernity. 

View the book at University of Chicago Press