Paul Nolte has been a full professor of modern and contemporary history at the Freie Universität Berlin since 2005. He earned his Ph.D. in 1993 at the University of Bielefeld, has been an assistant professor there and professor of history at International University Bremen, 2001-2005. In the academic year 2010-11, he was a Visiting Professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Paul Nolte has worked extensively on the history of 19^th and 20^th century Germany, with a focus on the linkages between social, political, and intellectual history, as in the beginnings of party formation and radical ideology in the early 19^th century, or notions of social order and class structure in the 20^th century. Other interests include the history of democracy, biographical approaches to post-45 historiography, and, more recently, the history of space, territory, and landscape. At FU Berlin, he has been directing the M.A. program in Public History since its beginnings in 2008.

Since 2021, he has been participating in a major research cluster on contemporary arts, “Intervening Arts”, financed by the DFG. Paul Nolte has been chief and managing editor of a major peer-reviewed journal, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, from 2004 to 2024.