Liesl Olson

Liesl Olson is the author of Modernism and the Ordinary (Oxford University Press, 2009) and the literary history of Chicago, Chicago Renaissance: Literature and Art in the Midwest Metropolis (Yale University Press, 2017), winner of the Poetry Foundation's 2018 Pegasus Award in Poetry Criticism. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and from the Newberry Library, where she also directed the Scholl Center for American History and Culture, and authored the exhibition catalog Chicago Avant Garde: Five Women Ahead of Their Time (2021). She is currently on a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, and is a scholar-in-residence at the Newberry Library. From 2004 to 2009, she taught at the University of Chicago as a Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the Humanities Division. She earned a BA from Stanford University and a PhD from Columbia University.