Olson-Mayes, Liam C.

Liam Olson-Mayes holds a PhD in rhetoric and public Cculture from Northwestern University. His research interests are firmly rooted in the humanities and include the conceptual and representational history of poverty, social and economic inequality, and the fantasy of meritocracy. His current project, “The Broken Hermeneutics of American Poverty,” examines 20th-century American ethnographies and argues that poverty, once a powerful means for understanding social and economic inequality, has lost its capacity to make the lives of those living on the lowest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder visible to those higher up. At Northwestern, he was a research associate at the Center for Transcultural Studies, collaborating with academics from around the world on the center’s “Democratic Agendas Network Project” and served as a research associate at the Center for Global Culture and Communication.