She received her PhD in Geography in 2012 from the University of Colorado, Boulder, upon completion of her doctoral dissertation, The city and the steppe: Territory, technologies of government and Kazakhstan’s new capital. Koch has published a number of peer-reviewed articles in journals including Eurasian Geography and Economics, Political Geography, Urban Geography and Environment and Planning A. Although Koch primarily positions herself as a political geographer, as well as a ‘Central Asianist,’ her work has always been highly interdisciplinary, with a focus on state-making, nationalism, geopolitics, spectacle, and authoritarianism.