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 Cold War. She is particularly interested in the interplay between NATO, American and Nordic foreign policies, technology, and infrastructure in the European and North American Arctics. Her work considers NATO from its edges.  

Entitled “Concrete Security: NATO as a Territorial Project, 1940-1960” her dissertation centers the built environment as a means to investigate how technology, the built environment, and high-level speech acts work in conjunction to establish the spatial, material, and (most importantly) territorial dimensions of the alliance. A secondary argument is that through the militarization processes of this overarching “territorial project,” NATO is establishing a critical and often tense relationship with its domestic entities - local populations, political cultures, economic industries, and the natural environment. Her other scholarly interests include: how the built environment and territory are inscribed within international law; the local and lived experience of foreign policy; how the built and natural environments impact the design of governance and legal mechanisms; and the relationship between ambiguity and interpretation in the language of such instruments and their implementation. 

She is currently a member of the International Policy Scholars Consortium and Network at Johns Hopkins University, and an Emerging Leader with the North American and Arctic Defense and Security Network. She was previously 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 previously been a Teaching Fellow with the Experiential Ethics program and is currently a Teaching Development Fellow with the Teaching + Learning Lab. 

Her policy-related work explores contemporary politics surrounding the Circumpolar North, focusing particularly on policies related to 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. In 2021 she held a Visiting Fellowship with the Arctic Institute, and has completed internships at 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.