To be human is to wonder, to seek meaning, to discover. Faculty of Arts’ graduate students create and disseminate knowledge in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Creative and Performing Arts through teaching, research, professional practice, artistic production, and performance in the context of freedom of inquiry and intellectual curiosity.
Arts combines the strengths of the humanities, social sciences, and creative and performing arts to serve as an interdisciplinary hub for research, learning, and innovation. Whether Arts scholars work with local communities, or explore issues such as climate change, world music, or international development, their research has a deep and broad impact on the local and international stage.
Arts has 25 academic departments, institutes, and schools spanning the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Creative and Performing Arts 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 in the creative arts, humanities, and social sciences, ideas that deepen their understanding of our humanity and its central role in an age of scientific and technological discovery. The disciplinary and multi-disciplinary approaches in our classrooms, our labs, and in our 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.
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Research Centres
Research Facilities
The 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 participated in the training of 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 aims to address 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 dedicated to collections-based research, an Ethnology Lab, a Conservation Lab, an Oral History and Language Lab supporting audio recording and digitization, a Library, an Archives, and a Community Lounge for the use of 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 nearly 80,000 object images, and the Reciprocal Research Network (RRN) that brings together 430,000 object records and associated images from 19 institutions.
Research Highlights
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 51 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. We consistently attract high levels of external research funding, and our success rate in the SSHRC Insight Grants and SSHRC Insight Development Grants programs is consistently higher than the national success rate.
Schools / Departments
Departments
- Anthropology
- Art History, Visual Art and Theory (formerly Fine Arts)
- Asian Studies
- Belkin Art Gallery (Morris & Helen)
- Central, Eastern and Northern European Studies
- Classical, Near Eastern and Religious Studies
- English
- French, Hispanic and Italian Studies
- Geography
- History
- Linguistics
- Museum of Anthropology
- Philosophy
- Political Science
- Psychology
- Sociology
- Theatre and Film
Schools
Graduate Degree Programs
Research Supervisors in Faculty
| Name | Academic Unit(s) | Research Interests |
|---|---|---|
| Abdul-Mageed, Muhammad | Department of Linguistics | Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Computational Linguistics, Social Media Mining, Arabic |
| Abrutyn, Seth | Department of Sociology | Suicide, Adolescent Suicide, Sociological Theory, Mental Health, Social Psychology, Emotions |
| Adriasola Munoz, Ignacio Alberto | Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory | investigates responses by artists and intellectuals to the crisis of aesthetic and political representation triggered by the failed protests against the US-Japan Security Treaty of 1960, and in particular their reliance on depictions of the sexual and geographical margins in their articulation of an aesthetics of political disaffection. |
| Ahmed, Rumee | Department of Asian Studies | Islam,Muslims,law,theology,Quran,Koran |
| Al-Kassim, Dina | Department of English, Institute for Gender, Race, Sex and Social Justice | Artistic and Literary Theories, Arts, Literature and Subjectivity, Arts and Cultural Traditions, Artistic and Literary Movements, Schools and Styles, Identity and Transnationality, Sexuality, Philosophy, History and Comparative Studies, Gender Relationship, postcolonial , anti-colonial, feminist, queer theory, psychoanalysis, subjectivity, comparative literature: Arabic, English, French |
| Alden, Lynn | Department of Psychology | Cognitive processes in the anxiety disorders, Social Anxiety Disorder, adult-onset Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, cognitive-behavior therapy |
| Alvarez-Moreno, Raul | Department of French, Hispanic & Italian Studies | Literary or Artistic Works Analysis, Artistic and Literary Movements, Schools and Styles, Artistic and Literary Theories, Literary or Artistic Work Dissemination or Reception Contexts, Language, Knowledge, Significance and Thought Building, Medieval and Early Modern Iberian Literature and Culture (Celestina, picaresque novel, short story), Economy and Medieval Literature and Culture , Visual Culture in Medieval and Early Modern Spain, Relations between Language and Ideology, Travel Writing |
| Anderson, Scott Allen | Department of Philosophy | intersection of ethics and social and political philosophy, largely focused on how to use and regulate power, coercion, and social norms; action theory and moral psychology, privacy, and problems related to the intensification of technology and information. |
| Anderson, Leonard | School of Music | Piano, Piano Pedagogy |
| Anderson, Kristin Siwan | Vancouver School of Economics | Micro-level institutions, role of gender, studies of rural governments |
| Anger, Suzy | Department of English | Victorian Literature, Literature and Philosophy, Victorian Literature and Psychology, Victorian Literature and Science, Hermeneutics |
| Antwi, Phanuel | Department of English | critical black studies; settler colonial studies; black Atlantic and diaspora studies; Canadian literature and culture since 1830; critical race, gender, and sexuality studies; and material cultures; |
| Arneil, Barbara | Department of Political Science | Identity politics, history of political thought |
| Arnovick, Leslie Katherine | Department of English | Oral tradition, business and technical writing, history and structure of the English language, linguistics |
| Averill, Gage | Haitian music, barbershop harmony, sound, music and power, music and politics, Caribbean music, steelband, ethnomusicology, world music, Ethnomusicology, Haiti, Haitian diaspora, American Popular Culture, Trinidad and Tobago, and Traditional Irish Music | |
| Aydede, Murat | Department of Philosophy | Philosophy of mind |
| Babel, Molly | Department of Linguistics | Phonetics, Recognition of Speech, Perception and Representation, Acoustics, Dialects, speech perception, acoustics of speech production, spoken word recognition, phonetic variation |
| Bablitz, Leanne | Department of Classical, Near Eastern & Religious Studies | Roman history, Roman law, Roman courtrooms, , Roman social history and law, Roman topography, Roman legal procedure |
| Badir, Patricia | Department of English | Medieval and reformation dramatic entertainment |
| Baier, Gerald | Department of Political Science | Canadian politics, federalism, constitutional law, courts, federal-provincial relations, Constitution, federalism and public law in Canada |
| Bailey, C. D. Alison | Department of Asian Studies | |
| Baines, Erin | School of Public Policy and Global Affairs | transitional justice; the politics of humanitarianism and forced displacement; and, the study of gender and armed conflict, with a regional focus on northern Uganda |
| Baker, Donald Leslie | Department of Asian Studies | Cultural and religious history of Korea |
| Bakker, Karen Jessica | Department of Geography | Political economy, political ecology, environmental studies, development studies, and resource and environmental management |
| Ballarin, Roberta | Department of Philosophy | Philosophical logic, nature and sources of necessity |
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Graduate Student Profiles
Alumni on Success
Recent Thesis Submissions
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The Arthur of the March of Wales (English - PHD)
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International trade and firm performance (Economics - PHD)
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Interpreting derived stative predicates : evidence from ʔayʔaǰuθəm (Linguistics - MA)
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Essays in applied econometrics (Economics - PHD)
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True stories : literary journalism and the making of social knowledge (Sociology - PHD)
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The killing of Syrian children : on the dangers of theorizing from emergency (Political Science - MA)
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Social anxiety and empathy for social pain (Psychology - PHD)
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The war lawyers : U.S., Israel and the spaces of targeting (Geography - PHD)
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Sum of the parts | art and the archive : the status of the document (Art History - MA)
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Modern acheiropoieta : the Veil of Veronica in the age of the Jacquard loom (Art History - MA)
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Acting like a state : the politics of foreign labor admission in Japan and Taiwan (Political Science - PHD)
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A reverse curse of knowledge in childhood (Psychology - MA)
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Mechanisms of coexistence between native and exotic plant species (Geography - MSC)