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.

As a Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS), Olsen is currently working on his third monograph, Promethean Minds (working title). 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.

Niklas Olsen is in residence in the autumn of 2025.
This information is accurate as of the academic year 2025-26.