Photo: Martin Dee
Applicants to Master’s and Doctoral degrees are not affected by the recently announced cap on study permits. Review more details
Arts has more than 25 academic departments, institutes, and schools as well as professional programs, more than 15 interdisciplinary programs, a gallery, a museum, theatres, concert venues, and a performing arts centre. Truly unique in its scope, the Faculty of Arts is a dynamic and thriving community of outstanding scholars – both faculty and students.
Here, our students explore cutting-edge ideas that deepen our understanding of humanity in an age of scientific and technological discovery. Whether Arts scholars work with local communities, or tackle issues such as climate change, world music, or international development, their research has a deep impact on the local and international stage.
The disciplinary and multi-disciplinary approaches in our classrooms, labs, and cultural venues inspire students to apply their knowledge both to and beyond their specialization. Using innovation and collaborative learning, our graduate students create rich pathways to knowledge and real connections to global thought leaders.
UBC Library has extensive collections, especially in Arts, and houses Canada’s greatest Asian language library. Arts graduate programs enjoy the use of state-of-the-art laboratories, the world-renowned Museum of Anthropology and the Belkin Contemporary Art Gallery (admission is free for our graduate students). World-class performance spaces include theatres, concert venues and a performing arts centre.
Since 2001, the Belkin Art Gallery has trained young curators at the graduate level in the Critical and Curatorial Studies program in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory. The Master of Arts program addresses the growing need for curators and critics who have theoretical knowledge and practical experience in analyzing institutions, preparing displays and communicating about contemporary art.
The MOA Centre for Cultural Research (CCR) undertakes research on world arts and cultures, and supports research activities and collaborative partnerships through a number of spaces, including research rooms for collections-based research, an Ethnology Lab, a Conservation Lab, an Oral History and Language Lab supporting audio recording and digitization, a library, an archive, and a Community Lounge for groups engaged in research activities. The CCR includes virtual services supporting collections-based research through the MOA CAT Collections Online site that provides access to the Museum’s collection of approximately 40,000 objects and 80,000 object images, and the Reciprocal Research Network (RRN) that brings together 430,000 object records and associated images from 19 institutions.
The Faculty of Arts at UBC is internationally renowned for research in the social sciences, humanities, professional schools, and creative and performing arts.
As a research-intensive faculty, Arts is a leader in the creation and advancement of knowledge and understanding. Scholars in the Faculty of Arts form cross-disciplinary partnerships, engage in knowledge exchange, and apply their research locally and globally.
Arts faculty members have won Guggenheim Fellowships, Humboldt Fellowships, and major disciplinary awards. We have had 81 faculty members elected to the Royal Society of Canada, and several others win Killam Prizes, Killam Research Fellowships, Emmy Awards, and Order of Canada awards. In addition, Arts faculty members have won countless book prizes, national disciplinary awards, and international disciplinary awards.
External funding also signifies the research success of our faculty. In the 2020-2021 fiscal year, the Faculty of Arts received $34.6 million through over 900 research projects. Of seven UBC SSHRC Partnership Grants awarded to-date, six are located in Arts, with a combined investment of $15 million over the term of the grants.
Since the 2011 introduction of the SSHRC Insight Grants and SSHRC Insight Development Grants programs, our faculty’s success rate has remained highly stable, and is consistently higher than the national success rate.
This is an incomplete sample of recent publications in chronological order by UBC faculty members with a primary appointment in the Faculty of Arts.
| Year | Citation | Program |
|---|---|---|
| 2021 | Dr. Tam studied how the costs of lying, either derived from physiological and moral barriers or fear of being caught lying, affect people's behavior. This research assists policy makers in implementing effective self-reporting mechanisms. | Doctor of Philosophy in Economics (PhD) |
| 2021 | Since the early 2000s, private condominium developers have taken on new roles as builders of low-income housing in Canada. Dr. Hyde examined the causes and consequences of these policy arrangements in Toronto and Vancouver, concluding that current density agreements have led to trade-offs that do not meet public needs for affordable housing. | Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology (PhD) |
| 2021 | Starting from the observation that working-class people are massively underrepresented in legislatures almost everywhere, Dr. Hemingway's research showed that the class backgrounds of politicians shape their attitudes and the policies they enact in office, particularly relating to inequality and economic issues. | Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science (PhD) |
| 2021 | Dr. Malette's work investigated how post-secondary environments impact undergraduate student mental health stigma, service use and the likelihood for experiencing mental illnesses such as depression and anxiety. Findings from this work highlighted the importance of examining social influences on student wellbeing.. | Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology (PhD) |
| 2021 | Dr. Ebner examined the impacts of ongoing economic restructuring on development processes and experiences of workers in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. | Doctor of Philosophy in Geography (PhD) |
| 2021 | Dr. Toledo Orozco studied the expanding informal governance systems of small-scale and artisanal gold miners in the Andes. Through cross-country comparison of miners' capacity to avoid and revert different state regulatory strategies, she illuminated the collective power of informal groups and the politics of enforcement in developing nations. | Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science (PhD) |
| 2021 | Dr. Orihara examined the evolution of trust, cooperation, and altruism in early modern Japan. Documenting the transition from covenants with Japanese deities to more secular based contracts, her work tied the role of trust to debates of early modernity. | Doctor of Philosophy in Asian Studies (PhD) |
| 2021 | Dr. Guntly demonstrated that paradoxical responses in discourse such as 'Yeah, that's wrong.' select different components in a speaker's utterance. Experimental results and natural examples show that paradoxical responses can target speaker beliefs or the question under discussion, in addition to the central claim of the utterance. | Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics (PhD) |
| 2021 | Dr. Gutierrez Cubillos showed that intergenerational mobility of earnings in Chile is non-linear, with very high mobility for the bottom 80 percent and very high persistence for the top. He also developed methodologies to include corporate retained earnings in the measurement of income inequality and applied them to Canada and Chile. | Doctor of Philosophy in Economics (PhD) |
| 2021 | Dr. Brace proposed and developed novel methods for evaluating and quantifying systematic bias in psychometric questionnaires. These methods can be used ensure the validity of between-group and cross-cultural comparisons of psychometric survey scores. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |