Christa J. Olson
Position title: Department Chair; Marjorie and Lorin Tiefenthaler Professor of English
Pronouns: she/her
Email: christa.olson@wisc.edu
Address:
7187b Helen C White
- Research Interests
- Rhetorical history, theory, and criticism; visual culture; Latin America; public memory; historical methods and methodological pedagogy; publics, democracy, nationalisms, & transnationalism; coloniality and anti-colonialism
- Teaching Areas
- I teach graduate and undergraduate courses in visual culture, research methods, and the history & theory of rhetoric. I enjoy working with students as they encounter, provide context for, and analyze persuasive artifacts of all types (images, speeches, texts, performances, etc.)
Degrees and Institutions
Ph.D. English & Writing Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, 2010
M.A. Performance Studies, New York University, 2001
B.A. Arts & Social Justice, The Paracollege, St. Olaf College, 2000
Selected Publications
Books
- On Visual Rhetoric. with Brandee Easter. University of Michigan Press, forthcoming 2025.
- American Magnitude: Hemispheric Vision and Public Feeling in the United States. The Ohio State University Press, 2021.
- Constitutive Visions: Indigeneity and Commonplaces of National Identity in Republican Ecuador. Penn State University Press, 2014.
Recent Articles
- “Rhetoric in Latin America: Seven Starting Places” The Cambridge History of Rhetoric, Volume V: Modern Rhetoric 1900-. Eds. Daniel M. Gross, Steven J. Mailloux, LuMing Mao. Forthcoming.
- “Burning our Fingers: An Intersectional Grapple with the Steel Cage of Racism,” College Composition & Communication. Second author, with Christopher Castillo. September 2024. Honorable Mention for the 2025 CCCC Braddock Award
- “‘Nuestras Reliquías Históricas’ and the Rhetorical Work of Objects at Machu Picchu.” Rhetoric, Politics, & Culture 1.2 (2021)
Recent Books
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Olson, Christa J. American Magnitude: Hemispheric Vision and Public Feeling in the United States. The Ohio State University Press , 2021. Print.At a moment in US politics when racially motivated nationalism, shifting relations with Latin America, and anxiety over national futures intertwine, understanding the long history of American preoccupation with magnitude and how it underpins national identity is vitally important. In American Magnitude, Christa J. Olson tracks the visual history of US appeals to grandeur, import, and consequence (megethos), focusing on images that use the wider Americas to establish US character. Her sources—including lithographs from the US-Mexican War, pre–Civil War paintings of the Andes, photo essays of Machu Picchu, and WWII-era films promoting hemispheric unity—span from 1845 to 1950 but resonate into the present.
Olson demonstrates how those crafting the appeals that feed the US national imaginary—artists, scientists, journalists, diplomats, and others—have invited US audiences to view Latin America as a foil for the greatness of their own nation and encouraged white US publics in particular to see themselves as especially American among Americans. She reveals how each instance of visual rhetoric relies upon the eyes of others to instantiate its magnitude—and falters as some viewers look askance instead. The result is the possibility of a post-magnitude United States: neither great nor failed, but modest, partial, and imperfect.
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Olson, Christa J.“Constitutive Visions.” 2013: n. pag. Print.In Constitutive Visions, Christa Olson presents the rhetorical history of republican Ecuador as punctuated by repeated arguments over national identity. Those arguments–as they advanced theories of citizenship, popular sovereignty, and republican modernity–struggled to reconcile the presence of Ecuador’s large indigenous population with the dominance of a white-mestizo minority. Even as indigenous people were excluded from civic life, images of them proliferated in speeches, periodicals, and artworks during Ecuador’s long process of nation formation. Tracing how that contradiction illuminates the textures of national-identity formation, Constitutive Visions places petitions from indigenous laborers alongside oil paintings, overlays woodblock illustrations with legislative debates, and analyzes Ecuador’s nineteen constitutions in light of landscape painting. Taken together, these juxtapositions make sense of the contradictions that sustained and unsettled the postcolonial nation-state.
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