[1] For graduate school, Olwig attended the University of Minnesota, where he completed a master's degree in Scandinavian language, literature, history and geography in 1971.
[3] He completed his doctorate in 1977;[3] his dissertation was titled "The morphology of a symbolic landscape: a geosophical case study of the transformation of Denmark's Jutland heaths circa 1750-1950.
[3] In 1996, Olwig published an influential paper on "Recovering the Substantive Nature of Landscape", using his favored philological form of inquiry.
[11] In it, Olwig used the roots of the Germanic cognates of "landscape" to push back against the more aesthetic understanding of the term that had come to dominate in the literature.
[15]The paper produced a lively debate between Olwig and backers of more aesthetic flavors of cultural geography, such as Denis Cosgrove.
[16] Olwig's arguments have become a key part of the discourse on landscape within cultural geography, and are engaged with in many reviews of this field.
[20] In January 2002, Olwig joined the faculty of the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, teaching landscape theory and history, and commuting to Sweden from his home in Copenhagen.