Altstadt started as a first year graduate student of international relations at the University of Chicago, supervised by professor Alexandre Bennigsen.
[2] In 1980 Altstadt visited Azerbaijan's capital Baku on a year-long academic exchange for doctoral research.
[2] In her first book, The Azerbaijani Turks: Power and Identity Under Russian Rule, Altstadt used both Russian-language and Azerbaijani-language newspapers, journals and scholarly publications, much of which has never been used in other Western studies.
[1] Altstadt also consulted with the US Foreign Service, Radio Liberty, US Institute of Peace, the CSCE and Freedom House.
With this premise, her history veers toward a nationalist narrative of Azerbaijan, assuming the immutable existence of a defined Azerbaijani nation across the centuries chafing for independence under successive foreign rulers.