Q&A with UVic Law's newest faculty member: Dr. Mary Anne Vallianatos
September 19, 2025
Dr. Mary Anne Vallianatos is continuing her academic career at UVic Law as an assistant professor.
She's no stranger to UVic Law— Dr. Vallianatos held a fellowship here teaching critical race theory, and just completed her PhD this past summer at the Fraser Building. She holds an LLM from Columbia Law School and a JD from the Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University.
Dr. Vallianatos comes to the faculty with a wealth of expertise in Canadian legal history, Asian Canadian history and critical race studies—her research includes law and empire, race, ethnicity and migration.
Prior to joining the faculty she was an assistant professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Windsor, and before her doctoral studies Dr. Vallianatos was called to the bars of Ontario and British Columbia and practiced Aboriginal law in Vancouver.
Q&A
You’ve just completed your PhD. Congrats! Can you tell us about it?
Definitely. My PhD was a legal history about race, migration and citizenship in British Columbia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I was interested in the complex laws that developed to restrict the rights of Asian migrants and citizens. Within this history, I was especially interested in the growth of exceptions to these laws—a topic that hasn’t been subject to much scholarship.
Can you share a bit about your current and past research projects and its significance in Canadian legal history?
I’ve started a new project about a little known, but important, Supreme Court of Canada case from 1955 that grappled with what was effectively the “white Canada” immigration policy. Together with my fantastic colleagues Jaimie Liew at U Ottawa and Vincent Wong at U Windsor, we’re examining this decision and its legacies. We hope that this legal history can contribute to the contemporary debates we are seeing around immigration law and policy.
What are you teaching here at UVic, and what do you hope students take away from your courses?
I’m excited to be teaching property law in the first-year program and immigration and citizenship law in the upper-year program. I hope students can tell that I want them to succeed! I hope they come away from class with a sense that the time and effort they invest in their studies is meaningful and feels relevant to their future aspirations.
What advice would you give to students interested in pursuing research in legal history or social justice?
My general advice to students would be the same advice that was given to me, which is to envision the kind of mentor you want to be. Law school can be intimidating, but I think it’s important to remember that you already have valuable life experience and impressive skills that can enable you to contribute to your community and offer assistance to the people around you.
What’s one of your favourite things to do on campus?
Browsing the shelves at Subtext for used books!