Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study
Sweden
fellow
Niklas Olsen
Home institution
University of Copenhagen
Country of origin (home institution)
Denmark
Discipline(s)
History of ideas
Theme(s)
Environment, Sustainability & Biodiversity
Fellowship dates
›
Biography
Niklas Olsen is Professor of Intellectual History at the University of Copenhagen. His research centers on political ideology, economic thought, and environmentalism in 20th-century Europe and beyond. He holds an MA in history from the University of Copenhagen and a PhD from the European University Institute. Olsen has also studied at UCLA and held visiting positions at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities in Essen and the Cambridge Centre for Political Thought.
Olsen is the author of History in the Plural: An Introduction to Reinhart Koselleck (2012), an intellectual biography of the influential German historian. His second book, The Sovereign Consumer: A New Intellectual History of Neoliberalism (2018), examines how neoliberalism has sought to reinvent democracy through the ideal of consumer sovereignty.
Research Project
The Business of Saving the Earth: Gurus of Green Capitalism, 1970–2000
As a Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS), Olsen is currently working on his third monograph, The Business of Saving the Earth: Gurus of Green Capitalism, 1970–2000. This project explores the techno-economic rationalities that shape contemporary climate and environmental politics through six biographically focused studies of key figures who have advanced “Promethean” approaches to environmental governance since the 1980s.
Research Interests:
political ideology, economic thought, environmentalism in twentieth-century Europe and beyond