Olaf Kaltmeier is professor of Iberoamerican History at the University of Bielefeld. He serves as director of CALAS-Maria Sybilla Merian Center for Advanced Latin American Studing in the Humanities and Social Science as well as spokesperson of the BMBF. At the University of Bielefeld, he serves on the Executive Board for the Center for Interamerican Studies (CIAS), as coordinator (with W. Raussert) of the BMBF project "The Americas as a Space of Entanglement" and is coordinator of the research area in the SFB 1288 "Practices of Comparing."

He is editor of the publication series Inter-American Studies / Estudios interamericanos. Wissenschaftsverlag Trier und Bilingual Press- Tempe University. (with W. Rassuert, J. Raab, and S. Thies), InterAmerican Research: Contact, Communication, Conflict. Routledge (with the same group). Currently, he is preparing three volumes of the International Handbook on the Americas. He has done investigation and teaching residencies in Mexico, Ecuador, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Argentina, and the USA.