As a member of the Arts & Humanities department, nicholae cline works primarily to support the Libraries, the Media School, and Philosophy, Gender Studies, and American Studies departments, and the community through building diverse and inclusive collections, supporting critical information and media literacies, developing engaging online research resources and guides, coordinating outreach to scholars across campus, and facilitating discovery of and access to materials across formats. They also support and liaise to the Race, Migration, & Indigeneity and Native American & Indigenous Studies programs. In their work, they are committed to building community, cultivating relationships, and removing obstacles to access and agency, and thus much of their efforts center around institutional change and justice work (including the many concerns related to diversity, equity, and inclusion).

nicholae's intellectual and research interests include critical theory, metaphysics, and philosophy; animal liberation and environmental humanities and ethics; feminist theory and transfeminisms; queer/transgender subjectivities and embodiment; decolonial and postcolonial thought; Indigenous epistemologies, worldviews, and sovereignty movements; critical race and ethnic studies (particularly mixed-race identity and the Black radical tradition); anti-racism, anti-oppression, and social justice in higher education; critical librarianship and abolitionist university studies; and disability justice, trauma-informed pedagogy and practice, and care work. Some of their presentations include: “Our Pedagogies, Our Selves: Culturally-Informed and -Responsive Practice” (with Jackie Huddle & Monique Threatt) for the Innovative Library Classroom conference, “Building Diverse (Media) Collections: An Integrative Approach" for the VideoTrust, "Representations of Indigeneity in Media: Towards an Indigenous Media Literacy" (part of "Literacy & Representation: Teaching Media & Visual Literacies Across Communities," co-presented with Jackie Huddle & Monique Threatt) in multiple venues, and “The Art of the Introduction: Encapsulating Identity, Agency, and Culture in Library Outreach & Engagement" (with Jen Brown, Sofia Leung, and Jorge López-McKnight) at the Identity, Agency, & Culture in Academic Libraries Conference.

They've also published widely, including "Like Our Lives Depended on It: Reflections on Embodied Librarianship, Counter-Spaces, & Throwing Down" from the 2018 collection In Our Own Voices, Redux and "Leaning on our Labor: Whiteness and Hierarchies of Power in LIS Work" in the collection Knowledge Justice: Disrupting Library and Information Studies through Critical Race Theory. Their most recent publications are “sketching otherwise im/possibilities: meditations against and beyond the state” from Dismantling Constructs of Whiteness in Higher Education: Narratives of Resistance from the Academy and “Knowing (un)Knowings: Cultural Humility, the Other(s), and Theories of Change” from Hopeful Visions, Practical Actions: Cultural Humility in Library Work, both with their frequent collaborator Jorge López-McKnight. They are currently working on an article about transgressive pedagogies and the future of information literacy, a book chapter on feminist approaches to management and leadership in libraries, and an edited collection centered around critical concepts within LIS theory and practice.

nicholae has been active in service to the university and field, having served for multiple years on the IU Libraries Diversity Committee (including 3 years as co-chair, during which the committee wrote the inaugural Diversity Strategic Plan [pdf]), various Bloomington Library Faculty Council committees, and chairing the Libraries' Diversity Residency Steering Committee, which supports the Residency program [pdf] and resident librarians. At the campus level, they currently serve on the Bloomington Faculty Council Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Committee and on the advisory boards for the LGBTQ+ Center and First Nations Educational & Cultural Center. Nationally, they have served on the American Library Association's Stonewall Book Awards and the Over the Rainbow Book List committees of the American Library Association for several terms, as well as the ALA Committee on Diversity, and were elected to the ALA Rainbow Round Table's Executive Board as a Director-at-Large in 2021. In 2020, they founded the We Reads project, which highlights and celebrates literature by BIPOC authors, and in 2021 they began organizing Community Study, which is a series of study groups and community learning spaces for BIPOC LIS workers. Both of these projects were dreamed up and realized with incredible friends and peers at other institutions, and are part of We Here, for which nicholae serves on the leadership team. Many of these relationships were built during their time at the Minnesota Institute for Early Career Librarians from Traditionally Underrepresented Groups, which they were selected for and attended in 2016.

nicholae is from rural southern Indiana, central Kentucky, and western West Virginia, and grew up haunting every library they could find within driving distance of wherever they happened to live at the time. After working for a few years as a bookseller, and as they were finishing their B.A., their intuition led them towards librarianship.

Before taking on their current position, nicholae served the IU Libraries as Visiting Digital Research Librarian and Media Services Coordinator. They received their M.L.S. (Digital Librarianship specialization) and B.A. in English literature (focus on poetry/creative writing and philosophy) from Indiana University.