Jeff is the Director of the Monterey Terrorism Research and Education Program (MonTREP) and Associate Professor in the Graduate School of International Policy Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies (MIIS). He obtained his B.A. in Middle Eastern, Islamic, and Central Asian history at the University of Michigan, his M.A. in social movements and political sociology at the University of California at Berkeley, and his Ph.D. in contemporary European history at Berkeley. He has taught at Berkeley, Columbia University, and the University of California at Irvine, and was the recipient of postdoctoral fellowships from the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia, the Office of Scholarly Programs at the Library of Congress, and the Center for German and European Studies at Berkeley. Dr. Bale has been studying extremist and terrorist groups for many years, has done archival research and interviewed extremists in several countries, and has published numerous articles on terrorism, right-wing extremism, Islamism, and covert operations. He is in the process of updating two book manuscripts on neo-fascist terrorist networks in Cold War Europe, editing a special issue of the journal Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions on Islamism, and gathering primary and secondary source materials for three new monographs, one on Islamist networks operating in Europe and North America, another on the growing reported links between dissident left- and right-wing radicals in the West and Islamist terrorists, and still another on "conspiracy theories" concerning major recent acts of terrorism (from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing to the 7/7 bombings in London). In addition to his teaching and research duties at MIIS, he also teaches courses on an adjunct basis at the Naval Postgraduate School and regularly consults for the U.S. government on matters related to political and religious extremism.