Read about some of our distinguished faculty and their accomplishments.
Dr. Jovanna Rosen
Assistant Professor
Dr. Jovanna Rosen earned her Ph.D. in Urban Planning and Development from the Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California. She also holds a Master of City Planning and undergraduate degrees from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to joining LMU, she was an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at Rutgers University-Camden. Dr. Rosen’s research and teaching draw from perspectives across urban planning, public policy, and geography to study the relationship between community development and urban political economy. She examines the connections between the state, capital, land, and cities; how these forces shape urban conditions and communities; and the strategies available to promote community interests and enhance social equity.
Dr. Rosen has three ongoing lines of research: social innovation, digital technologies, and housing markets. Social innovation refers to new strategies to solve complex social problems, spanning efforts across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors, from public policy to social movements. Along this line of research, she has studied community benefits, which are a recent urban organizing tactic to ensure that affected residents benefit from large-scale development projects. Her book, Community Benefits: Developers, Negotiations, and Accountability, published with the University of Pennsylvania Press, explores what these agreements actually deliver for residents. Dr. Rosen’s work on digital technologies and housing markets examines these topics as primary pathways of social transformation in cities today, which therefore offer important lenses to examine the changing nature of urban inequality and potential solutions. Among this research, she led a door-to-door survey of Los Angeles residents to understand how people cope with housing affordability pressures. This work has been cited in The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, among other outlets. Her research on the impacts of the digital technology sector on cities has been published in Annals of the American Association of Geographers and Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. She is currently working on a collaborative book project to understand how the digital technology sector is changing urban growth, cities, and inequality.
Dr. Rosen was raised on the California Central Coast and lived in Los Angeles for nearly a decade. She is excited to return to the city that shaped her passion for urbanism and that remains the focus of much of her research. In her free time, she enjoys swimming, backpacking, farmers markets, and exploring cities.
Welcome to LMU Dr. Rosen!
Dr. Nicole Van Lier
Assistant Professor
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.
Welcome to LMU Dr. Van Lier!