Read about some of our distinguished faculty and their accomplishments.
Dr. Emma Shaw Crane
Assistant Professor
Emma Shaw Crane is Assistant Professor of Urban and Environmental Studies at Loyola Marymount University. Professor Crane’s research and teaching interests include racialization, environment, and health; U.S. empire and carceral studies; and ethnographic and spatial research methods. Crane holds a PhD in American Studies from New York University and she was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University. Her writing has appeared in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Public Culture and Antipode. Crane’s research is grounded in the principles and accountable practices of research justice, and she currently co-directs a research coalition organizing against migrant detention and environmental racism in South Florida.
Crane’s in-progress book project draws on two years of ethnographic research in Homestead, a suburb of Miami, Florida, and moves across a constellation of linked sites: a military base, a detention camp for migrant children, a toxic Superfund site, and industrial flower plantations sustained by migrant workers, primarily Indigenous Maya people displaced from Guatemala. In 2023, her manuscript was selected for inclusion in the Atelier: Ethnographic Inquiry in the Twenty-First Century Series (University of California Press). Her next project turns to post-conflict environmental repair and combatant reintegration in peripheral neighborhoods of Bogotá, Colombia.
Welcome to LMU Dr. Shaw Crane!
Dr. Clare Beer
Assistant Professor
Dr. Clare Beer earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in Geography at UCLA. Prior to joining LMU, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Kentucky. Her research and teaching draw from the fields of economic geography and political ecology, and broadly concern the governance and justice dimensions of environmental sustainability. Her doctoral work on the Route of Parks project in Chilean Patagonia contributed to debates about the future of land conservation, the nature of state power, and the politics of environmental philanthropy. Her current work investigates the role of Chile’s public finance apparatus – specifically state subsidies for extractive industry – in the accelerating biodiversity crisis. She is also developing a second collaborative project on the relationship between settler colonialism and sustainability capitalism in California. Dr. Beer received paper and dissertation awards from the American Association of Geographers in 2021, 2022, and 2023, and was recognized with the Distinguished Teaching Award for Teaching Assistants by the UCLA Academic Senate in 2020.
As a proud alumna of a Jesuit University, Dr. Beer is thrilled to now be teaching in the Ignatian pedagogical tradition. When not at work, she enjoys hiking in the Santa Monica National Recreation Area, listening to LA public radio, and eating at Jonathan Gold’s favorite restaurants.
Welcome to LMU Dr. Beer!