Nicole Van Lier

Dr. Nicole Van Lier earned her PhD in Human Geography, with a specialization in Environmental Studies, from the University of Toronto. She also holds an interdisciplinary MA and a BEd from the University of Toronto, as well as a BA from the University of British Columbia. Prior to joining LMU, she was a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow at Dalhousie University. Dr. Van Lier’s research and teaching bring together the fields of political ecology and economy, urban geography, and environmental governance to explore the social, political, and economic relations that shape environmental management regimes in North America. She focuses on the state’s role in sustaining water-based economies in the Great Lakes region.

Dr. Van Lier is currently pursuing three areas of research: the politics of water quality regulation, questions of jurisdiction in fisheries co-management, and the dynamics of socio-ecological reproduction. Her doctoral research examined how the regulation, management, and financing of urban wastewater infrastructure across metropolitan Detroit worked to exacerbate a water affordability crisis in the city. This project brought to light a novel form of environmental justice, premised not on exposure to environmental harms but on the uneven financial burden for sustaining environmental quality. Her current work examines the historical and legal evolution of overlapping Indigenous and settler colonial fisheries in northern Michigan. She is interested in understanding how expanding Odawa and Chippewa economies have reconfigured the resource management practices of the settler colonial state. Her research has been published in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, and Antipode, among others. Dr. Van Lier received two paper awards from the American Association of Geographers in 2022.

Dr. Van Lier grew up in Toronto but has spent several years living in Spain, Detroit, and on both the east and west coasts of Canada. She is excited to make LA a new home and to explore more of California. She spends her free time reading novels, hiking, going to comedy shows, and making lists of films she will probably never watch.