Olivia Wynne Houck

Olivia Wynne Houck is a doctoral candidate in the History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she focuses on the intersection of the built environment, diplomacy, and geopolitics during the early Cold War. She is particularly interested in the interplay between NATO, American foreign policy, technology, and infrastructure in the European and North American Arctics. Her work considers American foreign policy and NATO from their coldest edges.  

Entitled “Concrete Security: Constructing and Defending the North Atlantic Region, 1940-1950” her dissertation centers the built environment as a means to investigate how the North Atlantic region became a strategic territory, in large part through the American desire for, and fear of, military bases on the islands of Greenland and Iceland during the Second World War and postwar period. The resulting territory, both infrastructurally and diplomatically, would form the basis of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Her chapter on the geopolitics of the Svalbard archipelago will be published in The Handbook of Arctic Politics (forthcoming), and she has edited two series for The Arctic Institute on ‘NATO in the Arctic’ and ‘Infrastructure in the Arctic,’ 

She is a Research Associate at The Arctic Institute and a Research Fellow with the North American and Arctic Defense and Security Network. This past autumn, she co-organized and moderated the 'AI, Security + Defense Forum,' a weekly speaker series about Arctic security topics that supported the dialogue between various communities in the technology and security spaces. She has previously been a Junior Scholar with the International Policy Scholars Consortium and Network at Johns Hopkins University and a fellow at the Cold War Archives Research Institute at the Wilson Center. During the 2021-2022 academic year, she held a National Science Foundation-Fulbright Arctic Research Award, which allowed her to be a visiting researcher with the Faculty of Political Science at the University of Iceland. At MIT, she has been a Teaching Fellow with the Experiential Ethics program, Pod Leader with MSRP, Teaching Assistant with MITES, Mentor with the Applicant Mentorship Program, and is currently a Teaching Development Fellow with the Teaching + Learning Lab and a Fellow with the Writing Center's 'Writing Together Online' program. 

Her policy-related work explores contemporary geopolitics surrounding the Circumpolar North, focusing on policies related to infrastructure and the militarization of the Arctic landscape. She is concerned with how to build relationships between industry, governments, and local groups in order to physically and economically develop the region in a sustainable and equitable way. In October 2023, she was a visiting researcher with the Fridtjof Nansen Institute in Oslo, and in 2021 she held a Visiting Fellowship with the Arctic Institute. She has completed internships with the Polar Institute at the Wilson Center, the US Mission to UNESCO, and the United Nations University, Gender Equality Studies program at the University of Iceland. 

She holds a B.A. in Art History from the College of William and Mary, an M.A. in Architectural History from the University of Virginia, and a Postgraduate Diploma in ‘Small States Studies’ from the University of Iceland. In her free time she likes traveling to cold places.