Audrey L. Altstadt-Mirhadi

Audrey L. Altstadt (born 1953) is an American historian, specializing in history of Azerbaijan and Sovietology. She holds the rank of a Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and authored three books and multiple articles on the politics, culture and history of Azerbaijan.

Academic work Altstadt started as a first year graduate student of international relations at the University of Chicago, supervised by professor Alexandre Bennigsen. In 1975, she received an undergraduate degree in Russian Language and Area Studies from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Under Bennigsen she studied the non-Russian nations, including Azerbaijan.

In addition to professorship, Altstadt holds an earned doctorate from the University of Chicago and an honorary doctorate from Khazar University of Baku, Azerbaijan. She has been in friendly relations with researchers Tadeusz Swietochowski, Svante Cornell and Thomas Goltz. According to Usitalo, the book contains "select, glaring, pro-Azeri biases".

Views In 2016, Altstadt, discussing the Azerbaijani economy and political leadership, referred to Ilham Aliyev as the "keystone in the arch" of Azerbaijani politics, and added "Its not so much that he is the great genius national leader like his father, but he keeps the balance".