Liesl Olson

Liesl Olson (she/her) is the director of the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum on the campus of the University of Illinois Chicago, where she is also a professor in the College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts. Olson is the author of Modernism and the Ordinary (Oxford University Press, 2009) and Chicago Renaissance: Literature and Art in the Midwest Metropolis (Yale University Press, 2017), winner of the Poetry Foundation's 2018 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism and the 2019 Mid-America Award from the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature. In 2021, Olson curated the exhibition Chicago Avant-Garde: Five Women Ahead of Their Time at the Newberry Library and produced its accompanying catalog. 

Olson was born in Düsseldorf, Germany, and grew up in Kansas City, Missouri. She earned an undergraduate degree from Stanford University and a PhD in English and comparative literature from Columbia University.