Liesl Olson is director of the Dr. William M. Scholl Center for American History and Culture at the Newberry Library. She is currently writing a book about Chicago’s literary and cultural centrality in the first half of the twentieth century called Modernism Made in Chicago. From 2004-2009, Olson taught at the University of Chicago as a Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the Humanities Division. She has held fellowships at the Newberry Library and from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Olson’s first book, Modernism and the Ordinary (Oxford University Press, 2009), examines a broad range of twentieth-century writers and how their works present the habitual and unselfconscious actions of everyday life. She earned a BA from Stanford University and a PhD from Columbia University.