Diana Lange holds a PhD in Central Asian Studies from Humboldt University of Berlin (2008) where she has been employed as a research associate at the Institute for Asian and African Studies since 2005. Trained in Sinology and Central Asian Studies, she has specialized on Tibet and China as her primary research areas. She has wide-ranging interests including the history of knowledge and exploration, material and visual cultures, historical cartography, and cultural interactions.
She has been a post-doc Gerda Henkel Fellow at the University of Leipzig, a visiting lecturer at the University of Zürich and an associated researcher in the European Research Council Project TibArmy at the CNRS in Paris. Over the last years her academic activities have been focused primarily on her habilitation project that she completed in 2018 at the EPHE in Paris. Using the British Library's Wise Collection—a collection of 55 large format maps and drawings made in the mid-nineteenth century in the Western Himalayas by a Tibetan lama and commissioned by a British official—she documented how, and with what intention, knowledge of Tibet was acquired, interpreted, and represented.
Currently Diana Lange is a research associate in the joint BMBF-project "Coloured Maps" (2018–2021) in Hamburg and is conducting research on a set of maps from East Asia kept in the Museum am Rothenbaum.