Liesl Olson

Liesl Olson is Director of Chicago Studies at the Newberry Library in Chicago. Born in Düsseldorf, Germany, Olson grew up in Kansas City, Missouri and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford University. She received her doctorate in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University in New York City. Olson’s first book MODERNISM AND THE ORDINARY (Oxford U P, 2009) examines a broad range of twentieth-century writers and how their works present the habitual and unselfconscious actions of everyday life. Her most recent book CHICAGO RENAISSANCE: LITERATURE AND ART IN THE MIDWEST METROPOLIS (Yale U P, 2017) traces a literary history of Chicago from the 1893 World’s Fair to the Chicago Black Renaissance of the mid-twentieth century. In particular, the book emphasizes writers and artists in Chicago who were part of the sweeping aesthetic transformations of the modernist movement.