Shoshana Schwebel
Doctor of Philosophy in Germanic Studies (PhD)
Metaphors of Trauma in German Cultural Texts
The Faculty of Arts at UBC brings together the best of quantitative research, humanistic inquiry, and artistic expression to advance a better world. Graduate students in the Faculty of Arts create and disseminate knowledge in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Creative and Performing Arts through teaching, research, professional practice, artistic production, and performance.
Arts has 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.
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 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.
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 76 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 2018-2019 fiscal year, the Faculty of Arts received $28.3 million through over 800 research grants. 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.
Schools / Departments
Graduate Degree Programs
Research Supervisors in Faculty
or browse the list of faculty members in various academic units. You may click each unit to view faculty members appointed in that unit. View the full faculty member directory for more search and filter options.
| Name | Academic Unit(s) | Research Interests |
|---|---|---|
| Abdul-Mageed, Muhammad | Department of Linguistics, School of Information | Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Computational Linguistics, Social Media Mining, Arabic |
| Abrutyn, Seth | Department of Sociology | Suicide, Sociological Theory, mental health, social psychology, Emotions, youth |
| 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, Kristin Siwan | Vancouver School of Economics | Micro-level institutions, role of gender, studies of rural governments |
| 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 |
| 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 | Early Modern Drama, Shakespeare, Medieval Drama, Early Modern Literature and Religion, Shakespeare in Canada, Canadian Modernism |
| 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 | pre-modern literature, fiction and literary criticism |
| Baines, Donna | School of Social Work | decent work and good care for older people in residential and home care, impact of neoliberalism on Indigenous social work education, impact of neoliberalism on non-Indigenous social work education, Age-Friendly Cities |
| 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 |
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Graduate Student Profiles
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Recent Thesis Submissions
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Conceiving abnormality (Geography - PHD)
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No Roma land : the spatial politics of inclusion in France (Anthropology - PHD)
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Reframing reform : positioning the Chinese economy in the World Bank (Geography - MA)
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"Between knowing and not knowing" : privacy, transparency and digital records (Library, Archival and Information Studies - PHD)
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The skill of mental health (Philosophy - PHD)
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Romancing modernity : poetry, process, and postsecularism (English - PHD)
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Non-binary trans subjects : exiting the attachment to the transgender metanarrative of man/woman (Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice - PHD)
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A reverse curse of knowledge in childhood (Psychology - MA)
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Assessing phonological development among Akan-speaking children (Linguistics - MA)
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Weaving our authority together : transforming the prairie Indigenous political order (Political Science - PHD)
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Measurement of awareness at the end of life (Psychology - PHD)
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Making place in hostile space : what are limits and radical possibilities of arts-based activism utilized by queer racialized activists in Britain today? (Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice - MA)
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The Social Learning Model : it takes time to figure out who you are (Political Science - PHD)
Doctoral Citations
A doctoral citation summarizes the nature of the independent research, provides a high-level overview of the study, states the significance of the work and says who will benefit from the findings in clear, non-specialized language, so that members of a lay audience will understand it.
| Year | Citation | Program |
|---|---|---|
| 2020 | Dr. Munawar designed an intersectional and de-colonial Islamic ethic of care by weaving her mother and father's experiences into the stories of Hajar, Yunus, and Maryam in the Islamic tradition. Her findings centre the epistemic authority of disabled Muslims and care-givers as knowers of the 'Islamic' and care-based modes of knowing Islam. | Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science (PhD) |
| 2020 | Dr. Marpeau studied the reception of Madame Bovary by Flaubert over time, according to various interpretive communities. Her research contributes to the field of cultural studies in the sense that it uses interdisciplinary academic approaches to understand a cultural object and its effects on its readers. | Doctor of Philosophy in French (PhD) |
| 2020 | Dr. Brothers investigated Roman spectacles as a medium for dynastic promotion in the Severan age. She discovered that during this tumultuous period, spectacles offered an opportunity for the emperor to demonstrate his benefaction, to create a positive public image for himself, and to associate himself with the great emperors of the past. | Doctor of Philosophy in Classics (PhD) |
| 2020 | Dr. Varao-Sousa examined whether studies of mind wandering in the lab reflect mind wandering in real life. Her research provides evidence that rates of inattention are affected by both the task and the naturalness of the setting, a conclusion which has profound implications for theories of human attention. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |
| 2020 | Dr. Patchin examined the cultural and geographical politics of the Zika public health emergency. Her findings show that Zika intervention was deceptive and coercive, with the potential for destructive consequences in environmental and reproductive health. This work contributes to theorizing human reproduction amidst growing ecological uncertainty. | Doctor of Philosophy in Geography (PhD) |
| 2020 | Dr. Vig examined an important literary genre within the Sikh tradition called gurbilas, written in Brajbhasha, and located it within the cultural and religious context of early modern North India (c. 1500-1850). Her research opens up a rich world of shared imaginaries between the Sikhs and other religious communities, as well as cultural worlds. | Doctor of Philosophy in Asian Studies (PhD) |
| 2020 | Dr. Hallenbeck worked in collaboration with Coast Salish and Sahtu Dene storyteller, playwright and fisherman Rosemary Georgeson, to develop a decolonial approach to archival research. The thesis decenters the colonial archive and retells the history of the endurance of Indigenous women's connections to water, fish, and family along the Salish Sea. | Doctor of Philosophy in Geography (PhD) |
| 2020 | Dr. Ransom examined the nature of perceptual learning for expertise, arguing that it is best understood as involving a change in the contents of perceptual experience itself, rather than simply the sorts of inferences experts are able to make. This has an impact on real-world training programs in fields from medicine to military to art criticism. | Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy (PhD) |
| 2020 | Dr. Turgeon-Solis studied Eighteenth Century authors' fascination with the figure of the nun. Her research sheds new light on a social imagination that was prevalent in the Eighteenth Century, and is an original contribution to the study of the representation of women in literature. | Doctor of Philosophy in French (PhD) |
| 2020 | Dr. Johal's research seeks to understand how shame and stigma have shaped women's participation in Punjabi theatre, and to analyze the factors that can enable female participation and success in the face of constraint. Her research focused on the life stories of four women who have made significant contributions to Punjabi theatre. | Doctor of Philosophy in Asian Studies (PhD) |