Christine Nölle-Karimi specializes in regional history and concepts of power and space. She completed her PhD in Near Eastern Studies at U.C. Berkeley in 1995. Entitled State and Tribe in Nineteenth-Century Afghanistan, her dissertation bore on the genesis of the modern Afghan state and its impact on the relationship between the state-supporting elite and local powerbrokers. In 2009 she obtained the Venia legendi in Iranian Studies at Bamberg University. Her Habilitation (Herat and the Mapping of Khurasan from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries, forthcoming) explores the changes concepts of statehood and territoriality underwent since early modern times. Her current projects include the study of Persian travelogues and modernism in Persophone Literary History.