Photo: Martin Dee
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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.
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.
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.
| Name | Academic Unit(s) | Research Interests |
|---|---|---|
| Abdul-Mageed, Muhammad | Department of Linguistics | Artificial intelligence (AI); Deep Learning; Natural Language Processing; Machine Learning; Computational Linguistics; Social Media Mining; Arabic |
| Abrutyn, Seth | Department of Sociology | Social theory; Sociological Theory; Suicide; 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 | Islamic studies; Islam; Muslims; Religion; Law; Theology; ethics; Philosophy |
| Al-Kassim, Dina | Department of English, Institute for Gender, Race, Sex and Social Justice | Critical identity, ethnic and race studies; English language; Gender, sexuality and education; Human rights, justice, and ethical issues; anti-colonial; Artistic and Literary Movements, Schools and Styles; Artistic and Literary Theories; Arts and Cultural Traditions; Arts, Literature and Subjectivity; comparative literature: Arabic, English, French; feminist; Gender Relationship; Identity and Transnationality; Philosophy, History and Comparative Studies; postcolonial; psychoanalysis; queer theory; sexuality; Subjectivity |
| 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 |
| Amijee, Fatema | Department of Philosophy | Metaphysics; Modern Philosophy; feminist philosophy; History of Analytic Philosophy |
| Anderson, L. Mark | School of Music | Piano, Piano Pedagogy |
| 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. |
| 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; |
| Arefin, Mohammed | Department of Geography | Human geography; History of sciences and technology (except medicine and health care); urban geography; discard studies; urban political ecology; Environmental justice; waste; sanitation; geographical political economy |
| 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 | Linguistics; Phonetics; Recognition of Speech; Perception and Representation; Acoustics; Dialects; acoustics of speech production; phonetic variation; speech perception; spoken word recognition |
| 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 | English language; Canadian Modernism; Early Modern Drama; Early Modern Literature and Religion; Medieval Drama; Shakespeare; Shakespeare in Canada |
| 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, 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 |
| Baines, Donna | School of Social Work | Social work; Age-Friendly Cities; 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 |
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 |
|---|---|---|
| 2020 | Dr. Oluic dissertation focuses on the creation of an imagined European community in the nineteenth century as posited by four thinkers and essayists from Spain and Italy. His research elaborates a link between nineteenth century Europeanism and the present, exploring the relations that define national and supranational sovereignty. | Doctor of Philosophy in Hispanic Studies (PhD) |
| 2020 | Dr. Murch investigated the psychology of slot machine gambling. He found behavioural and physiological markers of a highly-focused attentional state called immersion in play. These findings clarify the role of slot machine design in the development of gambling problems, providing new guidance for treatment professionals and gambling regulators. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |
| 2020 | Dr. Wells offers a corrective to the common historiography of the Korean language, which treats vernacularity as natural and literary vernacularization as foreordained. He shows that turn-of-the-20th c. shifts in Korean language practice were not inevitable, but driven by Korean nationalists, Western missionaries and Japanese imperial officials. | Doctor of Philosophy in Asian Studies (PhD) |
| 2020 | Dr. Manson examined how Romani people living in France are being affected by state efforts to regulate their movement and place of residence. His analysis shows that larger debates about the place of the Roma in Europe are increasingly being played out spatially through localized battles over housing, mobility, and other basic rights. | Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology (PhD) |
| 2020 | Dr. Peiris explored a drumming tradition in Sri Lanka, looking at how people have thought of it before, during, and after the encounter with European colonial rule. He used musical change as a lens to examine changing social contexts in South Asia, contributing to broader discussions about the reach and impact of ideas that cross national borders. | Doctor of Philosophy in Music, Emphasis Ethnomusicology (PhD) |
| 2020 | Dr. Corbett examined the history of punctuality in modern Britain to better understand its development as a value. Tracing the use of the word punctuality, he found that the pressure to be 'on time' is rooted in moral valuations of debt, credit, and trust, which emerged in early eighteenth-century Britain. | Doctor of Philosophy in History (PhD) |
| 2020 | Dr. Villacreses proposes a conceptual approach to understand literary production from a writer's global creative project. He incorporates media studies, the analysis of works of fiction, critical interventions, and public image into the overall literary study of an author. He applied this method in Latin American writers from the late 20th century. | Doctor of Philosophy in Hispanic Studies (PhD) |
| 2020 | As a feminist geographer, Dr. Collard explored the social, political, and legal dimensions of preimplantation genetic tests and the abnormal embryos to which they give rise. She found that the de-selection of these embryos in fertility clinics reflects deeply held assumptions about the bodies and lives we are supposed to want to have and reproduce. | Doctor of Philosophy in Geography (PhD) |
| 2020 | Dr. Osterberg examined police responses to gang violence in BC's lower mainland by conducting qualitative interviews with forty-two police officers and two civilian employees across three jurisdictions. She argues that a productive way forward might include broader community and public health engagement in gang prevention and intervention. | Doctor of Philosophy in Geography (PhD) |
| 2020 | Dr. Gedda examined the earliest versions of the rahitname, a literary genre of Sikh religious ethics. His research situated the production of this genre in relation to the historical and literary context of South Asia in the early eighteenth century. His study contributes to the cultural and social history of pre-modern South Asia. | Doctor of Philosophy in Asian Studies (PhD) |
