Faculty Members

Peter B. Olson grew up in the Washington, D.C. area. He spent seven years in Boston, MA, studying at the Berklee College of Music where he received a diploma and a Faculty Award for Outstanding Performance. He subsequently lived in Minneapolis, MN, earning a B.M. in bass performance and an M.A. in music theory at the University of Minnesota while teaching at the MacPhail Center for the Arts and at Carleton College. He moved to Tennessee in 2001, becoming Charles K. Wolfe's research assistant at Middle Tennessee State University. He studied ethnomusicology, English composition, and American literature at the University of Memphis, earning an M.A. in English literature and the Certificate in African-American Literature. He is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Memphis in English textual studies, and is writing a dissertation on the ideology of transatlantic romantic originality as it appears in the work of Cooper, Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Elizabeth Stoddard, and Whitman. He has published recently in the Journal of the Society for American Music , the Encyclopedia of Alabama, and the Encyclopedia of Appalachia. His research interests include exploring continuities in transatlantic romanticism, political and theological discourses in American literature, early-American literary publishing, 19th- and 20th-century popular culture including minstrelsy and vernacular music, modernism and urbanization, and American transcendentalism.