Patricia Springborg received her first degrees in Political Science from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand and her doctorate from Oxford University. She has taught political science in New Zealand, and as a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California, Berkeley, and held a personal chair in Political Theory in the Department of Government at the University of Sydney before being appointed professor ordinario in the School of Economics of the Free University, Bolzano. Elected to the Australian Academy of the Social Sciences in 1999, she has been a stipendiary fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Centre for International Scholars in Washington DC, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala, was a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at St John's College, Oxford, and was the recipient of a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Award in International Peace and Security, taken up at the Brookings Institution, Washington, DC. As a political theorist she works across a wide field, from political economy (The Problem of Human Needs, 1981), to theory of the state (Royal Persons, 1990), Orientalism (Western Republicanism and the Oriental Prince, Cambridge University Press, 1992), and the history of political thought. She is also the co-editor of the first English translation and critical edition of Thomas Hobbes's long Latin poem 'Historia Ecclesiastica'. She has published articles in journals such as The American Political Science Review, Political Theory, Political Studies, the Journal for the History of Political Thought and the British Journal for the History of Philosophy.