Audrey L. Altstadt

Audrey L. Altstadt came to UMass in 1990 as a historian of the USSR. A specialist in the minority nationalities of the Russian Empire and USSR, she earned her BA at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne (Russian Language and Area Studies, 1975), and graduate degrees at the University of Chicago (AM in International Relations 1977, PhD in History 1983). She has an honorary doctorate from Khazar University (Baku, Azerbaijan 2000). 

Her current book project is "First In: The American Diplomats Who Opened Embassies in New Post-Soviet States, 1992." Based on documents, oral histories, and personal interviews, this book examines each of the "new states" created by the dissolution of the Soviet Union, their recognition by the US, and the women and men of the US State Department's Foreign Service who formed the first teams opening those embassies.

Professor Altstadt is the author of three books on the history and culture of Azerbaijan: The Politics of Culture in Soviet Azerbaijan, 1920-1940 (Routledge 2016); The Azerbaijani Turks: Power and Identity under Russian Rule (Hoover Institution Press 1992) and Frustrated Democracy in Post-Soviet Azerbaijan (Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Columbia University Press, 2017).

She is author of dozens of articles on the politics, culture and history of Azerbaijan published in the US, UK, France, Turkey and Azerbaijan. She has been a recipient of various grants including from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Harvard Russian Research Center, the US Institute of Peace. She has been a consultant for Freedom House, Oxford Analytica (UK), Radio Liberty, US Department of Justice Immigration and Naturalization Service, the US State Department, the Commission for Security and Cooperation in Europe and other agencies.