Research Interests
Contemporary Political Theory, Insurgent and Popular Politics, Colonialism and Postcoloniality, Cultural Politics, Poststructuralism, Critical Theory
Current Research
Kevin Olson is a political theorist who writes on issues of insurgent and popular politics, colonialism and postcoloniality, cultural politics, poststructuralism, and critical theory. He has methodological interests in genealogy, visual culture, and archival research. Olson is the author of Subaltern Silence: A Postcolonial Genealogy (Columbia), Imagined Sovereignties: The Power of the People and Other Myths of the Modern Age (Cambridge), Reflexive Democracy: Political Equality and the Welfare State (MIT), and editor of Adding Insult to Injury: Nancy Fraser Debates Her Critics (Verso). He is also co-editor of the journal Political Theory. He has held residential fellowships as an Albert and Elaine Borchard Foundation Scholar in Residence at the Château de la Bretesche, France, an Erasmus Mundus Scholar at Utrecht University, The Netherlands, and from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) in Germany.
Olson’s most recent book, Subaltern Silence: A Postcolonial Genealogy, focuses on the politics of subordination and resistance, examining the complex ways that subaltern subjects have been silenced, particularly in colonial and postcolonial contexts, and some of the subtle and unexpected forms of resistance they have mounted in return. This work explores rich archives of treatises, pamphlets, broadsheets, correspondence, administrative documents, court records, illustrations, caricatures, and photographs from the revolutionary Caribbean and colonial Europe. It draws insights from Michel Foucault, Gayatri Spivak, Pierre Bourdieu, Benedict Anderson, Ernesto Laclau, and others, and ranges over themes of collective imagination, affect, performativity, the construction of public spheres, and the dynamics of subaltern speech.
Education
PhD, Northwestern University, 1995
MA, Northwestern University, 1991
BA, Carleton College, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, 1986