Dr. Patrice Olsen

Teaching Interests & Areas

Professor Olsen is a specialist in Latin American history. Her manuscript, "Artifacts of Revolution: Architecture, Society, and Politics in Mexico City, 1920-1940," (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008) received the Lewis Hanke Prize from the Conference on Latin American History, and the Michael C. Meyer Award from the Rocky Mountain Council for Latin American Studies. Other publication areas include Latin American architecture and popular culture, and U.S. national security, the Bush Doctrine, and foreign intelligence. Her teaching fields include colonial and modern Latin American history, environmental history and human rights, the Borderlands, Latin American military history, foreign intelligence and covert operations, and U.S. nuclear history and strategy. She has also been co-director of ISU's study tours to Cuba, and coordinates environmental history programs in the Peruvian Amazon. She received the University Teaching Initiative Award in 2002-2003, and the College of Arts and Sciences Outstanding College Teacher Award (Social Sciences) in 2004-05. Her current research includes collective memory and monumentality in Cuba, the relationship between human and environmental rights in Peru, the atomic landscape, and foreign intelligence and hemispheric security. An avid photographer, her work has been published in various texts and multimedia forms.