Jamie Olson

Jamie Olson has taught in the English department at Saint Martin's since 2008, when he moved to the Olympia area after finishing his Ph.D. in English at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Right after high school, he served for six years in the U.S. Marines, and in 2002 he received his B.A. in English from the College of St. Scholastica, a Benedictine institution in Minnesota. Alongside his English studies, Dr. Olson completed a Russian minor in college and took three years of Slavic coursework in graduate school.

Dr. Olson is a scholar and translator of poetry, and at Saint Martin’s he teaches academic writing, modern American literature, Russian language and literature, world literature in translation, and thematic courses on medicine, the environment, and U.S. immigration. During his graduate studies at the University of Michigan, he specialized in modern and contemporary poetry, and he wrote his dissertation, Rooted Cosmopolitanism in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, and Joseph Brodsky, under the direction of two important scholars of modern poetry, George Bornstein and Laurence Goldstein. Dr. Olson is a member of several professional organizations, including the American Literary Translators Association and the Modern Language Association. He is the faculty advisor for the SMU chapter of Sigma Tau Delta, the international English honor society.