Kristina Olson is an Associate Professor of Italian and the Italian Program Coordinator at George Mason University, where she has taught Italian language, literature, and cinema since 2005. She earned her PhD in Italian from Columbia University.

Professor Olson is the author of Courtesy Lost: Dante, Boccaccio, and the Literature of History and several articles on Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch. She is the coeditor of Open City: Seven Writers in Postwar Rome; Boccaccio 1313–2013; and the second edition of Approaches to Teaching Dante’s “Divine Comedy” with the Modern Language Association.

Professor Olson is the president of the American Boccaccio Association and previously served as vice president and treasurer. She was also the vice president of the Dante Society of America for two years and a councilor for three years. She serves on the editorial boards of Bibliotheca Dantesca, an international journal dedicated to Dante studies, and Dante Studies, the annual publication of the Dante Society of America, and she is an executive committee member for the Modern Language Association’s Languages, Literatures, and Cultures forum on Medieval and Renaissance Italian.