![](https://www.grad.ubc.ca/sites/default/files/styles/card_vertical_767/public/students/screenshot_2023-10-12_at_10.09.15_pm.png?itok=mckJXMu8)
Leah Alfred-Olmedo
Doctor of Philosophy in English (PhD)
The Indigenous monstrous & the monstrous Indigenous
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.
Name | Academic Unit(s) | Research Interests |
---|---|---|
Aydede, Murat | Department of Philosophy | Philosophy; Philosophy of Mind |
Baada, Jemima | Department of Geography | intersections of gender, climate change, migration, health and development equity |
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 Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies | Roman history, Roman law, Roman courtrooms, , Roman social history and law, Roman topography, Roman legal procedure |
Badir, Patricia | Department of English Language and Literatures | 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 |
Bain, Kimberly | Department of English Language and Literatures | History, theory, and philosophy of the African diaspora; Race, gender, environmental and medical racism; Anthropocene; Black arts and letters |
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 |
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 | Humanities and the arts; Korean History; Confucian Philosophy; Religion in Korea; science in pre-modern Korea; Kwangju Uprising of 1980 |
Ballarin, Roberta | Department of Philosophy | Philosophical logic, nature and sources of necessity |
Barnes, Trevor | Department of Geography | Vancouver |
Barnett, Kristen | Department of Anthropology | intersection of Indigenous and western science; research and data sovereignty; Indigenous feminisms; decolonizing; reframing archaeology |
Baron, Andrew | Department of Psychology | cognitive development, infancy, childhood, adolescence, racism, race, stereotypes, cooperation, bias, innateness, science education, multiculturalism, gender, ethnicity, neuromarketing, attitudes, preferences, psychology |
Bartha, Paul | Department of Philosophy | Philosophy of sciences and technologies; Environmental philosophy; philosophy of science; Philosophy of Probability; Confirmation; Decision Theory |
Baum, Bruce | Department of Political Science | Political Culture, Society and Ideology; critical social theory; feminist theory; critical hermeneutics; issues of cross-cultural interpretation; American political thought and cultural politics; political theories of Mill and Marx; philosophy of political inquiry; liberal and democratic theory |
Baylis, Patrick | Vancouver School of Economics | Economics; Climate Changes and Impacts; Economic Planning of Energy; climate change economics; energy economics; environmental economics |
Beasley-Murray, Jon | Department of French, Hispanic & Italian Studies | Latin American studies, social and political theory |
Beatty, John Henry | Department of Philosophy | Socio-political dimensions of genetics and evolutionary biology |
Beauchesne, Kim | Department of French, Hispanic & Italian Studies | Colonialism; Latin America; Trans-Pacific Studies; Globalization |
Beaudry, Paul | Vancouver School of Economics | National and International macroeconomic issues, Business cycles, inflation, financial markets, the macro-economic effects of technological change and globalization, and the determinants of aggregate employment and wages |
Bedke, Matthew | Department of Philosophy | Philosophy; Philosophy, History and Comparative Studies; Foundations of Ethics; Social Organization and Political Systems; Ethics and Fundamental Issues of Law and Justice; epistemology; ethics; metaethics; philosophy of law; political philosophy |
Belcourt, Billy-Ray | School of Creative Writing | Fiction; Nonfiction; Poetry |
Berdahl, Jennifer | Department of Sociology | Ostracism, Harassment and Bullying, Gender and Diversity in Organizations, Power and Status in Groups, Harassment, Work-Family Interface |
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 |
---|---|---|
2024 | Dr. Whetung's research argues that practicing Nishnaabeg place-based relationships in everyday life contributes to building alternative worlds that both respond to violence, and actively create a new world in which violence is unimaginable. | Doctor of Philosophy in Geography (PhD) |
2024 | Dr. Yip's thesis examined how our human tendency to mind-wander impacts our negative moods, and how this tendency helps to explain the clinical challenges of depression and ruminative thinking. Her insights show how regulating our emotions may impact our awareness, intention, and control over our thoughts. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |
2024 | Dr. Shamei demonstrated that humans employ posture within the vocal tract when speaking, and that the control of posture is similar across gross and fine motor skills. These findings help to unify our understanding of human motor control across different domains. | Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics (PhD) |
2024 | Dr. Triponez investigated the archival preservation of independent music production by interviewing music creators. He found that social and technological disruption, evolving creative practices, and the abundance of archival material pose preservation problems that result in an ongoing loss of documentary cultural heritage. | Doctor of Philosophy in Library, Archival and Information Studies (PhD) |
2024 | Dr. Heltzel finds that people typically like political allies who engage constructively with opponents. And yet, US Senators' social media posts get more likes and shares when they dismiss opponents because active extremists prefer such content. For this and other reasons, people incorrectly expect backlash for engaging with opponents. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |
2024 | Dr. Mellema studied Modern Art specializing in Marxist feminism. Her dissertation provides an account of how artists index socially reproductive labour, the daily labour needed to sustain human beings and social communities. Her dissertation provides a corrective to art historical accounts that have ignored gendered labour and working people. | Doctor of Philosophy in Art History (PhD) |
2024 | Dr. Dowd built on more than a decade of field experience in the Himalaya to create an ethnographic portrait of the Tibetan language and its role in Buddhist transmission. He argues transmission represents the culmination of silence, speech and writing, where these three modes of language converge to transmit the Buddha's teachings. | Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology (PhD) |
2024 | Dr. Tilton examines feminist critiques of "traditional" epistemology, which is individualistic and assumes that epistemic standards are neutral. She links feminist critiques of traditional epistemology to a creeping anxiety that is undermining feminist epistemology's political possibilities, urging a return to more traditional notions of objectivity. | Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy (PhD) |
2024 | Dr. Kuang studied the political economy of global 5G governance. Her dissertation, "A Mosaic of Mundane Innovations," shows how a new open and decentralized form of global governance took shape in the 5G technology regime. Her work foregrounds new possibilities for latecomer economies to participate in the making of the international economic order. | Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science (PhD) |
2024 | Dr. Winter-Billington showed that wind-blown snow and rainwater contribute to the accuracy of predictions of the melting of glaciers that are covered in the rock debris from landslides. This research contributes to improved accuracy of forecasts and projections of the retreat of glaciers and regional hydrological impacts due to increased air temperature. | Doctor of Philosophy in Geography (PhD) |