Dr Elizabeth Olson

Elizabeth (Betsy) Olson is Professor in the Department of Geography and Environment at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

She received her PhD in Geography from the University of Colorado and previously held positions at the University of Lancaster, England, and the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.

Her writing and teaching focuses on ethics and practices of care and inequality across diverse contexts, themes, and geographic regions. Her research has been funded by NSF, ESRC/EHRC (UK), PCORI, and the European Union, and she has published widely in geography and interdisciplinary journals, and she has co-edited and co-authored five books on gender, religion, and development inequality.

Over the past ten years, she has focused much of her research on building interdisciplinary teams to produce evidence for supporting young carers and their families in the US and helping policy makers create impactful changes in schools and health care.

Through her higher education leadership, Professor Olson has worked to transform the discipline and the capacity of our universities to confront historical legacies of violence.

She has been generously recognized by the American Association of Geographers for her contributions to diversity (2024) and the Carolina Women’s Leadership Council for junior faculty mentoring (2022).

As the inaugural recipient of the UNC William and Sara McCoy Performing Arts Leadership Award (2024), she collaborates with artists to produce new ways to understand and share the embodied intimacies of difference.

Alongside her partners at Culture Mill, a local arts collective, she brings together community groups and students to create place-based artistic interventions and disruptions to better tell the history of UNC’s and Chapel Hill’s racialized landscapes.

Their new collaboration considers how therapeutic movement and dance for people with chronic illness operates as a medium for understanding and analyzing ethics of care.