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 |
|---|---|---|
| 2010 | Dr. Alzahrani examined the involvement of editorial boards of scholarly journals in liberalizing access policies to journal content. He found that, while generally positive about open access, editors were not active proponents for change. His findings help explain the editors' role in the dramatically changing landscape of scholarly publishing. | Doctor of Philosophy in Library, Archival and Information Studies (PhD) |
| 2010 | Dr. Montanaro developed a non-electoral theory of democratic representation. Her theory provides criteria by which to judge the legitimacy of unelected actors, such as Bono and Oxfam, who claim to represent marginalized peoples. Dr. Montanaro's theory helps us to think about democratic representation beyond its electoral forms. | Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science (PhD) |
| 2010 | Dr. Ney inserted the texts from an early Anglican mission to Yorubaland into Nigerian literary history. By showing how nineteenth-century evangelistic writings as well as twentieth-century novels and plays participate in some of the same cultural transformations, he helps us to understand how Christianity became part of African history. | Doctor of Philosophy in English (PhD) |
| 2010 | Dr. Kwon examined how a traditional Chinese fictional narrative, namely Sanguo yanyi, has become enduringly popular in Korean literary work since its importation in the sixteenth century. | Doctor of Philosophy in Asian Studies (PhD) |
| 2010 | Dr. Chiang employed mixed methods to study annotations in an online environment. Her study explores online annotation functionalities, reasons for annotating and sharing annotations, as well as impacts on reading and writing online. The research has implications for system design. | Doctor of Philosophy in Library, Archival and Information Studies (PhD) |
| 2010 | Dr. Makmillen uses rhetorical theory to understand texts arising from the contact between Indigenous peoples and settler societies in Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand. She shows how variously situated readers interpret and are persuaded by the language of treaties, legal judgments and other texts, and how this affects Indigenous claims to land and other rights. | Doctor of Philosophy in English (PhD) |
| 2010 | Dr. Shariff's dissertation focused on the evolutionary adaptiveness and social effects of emotion expressions, with a particular focus on the self-conscious emotions of pride and shame. His primary area of research, however, empirically addressed the relationship between religion and moral behaviour, with an eye towards uncovering the evolutionary and cultural origins of religious institutions. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |
| 2010 | Dr. Laetz's doctoral research explored the potential for understanding aesthetic experience by using ideas from biology. He rejected the widely held rule that biological categories must be used to frame our aesthetic encounters with nature. At the time of his untimely death, he was working on evolutionary explanations of artistic creativity. | Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy (PhD) |
| 2010 | Dr. Semczyszyn developed a philosophical account of medical imaging technologies. Drawing on current medical practice and theories of pictorial representation she reconciles imaging as making visual representations of invisible properties with imaging as a way of seeing the body. | Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy (PhD) |
| 2010 | Dr. Robinson examined how communities organize against water privatization. Through a qualitative comparative study, she identified the importance of linking local and global issues for movement outcomes. Her research demonstrates that successful social movements are those that are connected globally and rooted in local communities. They are not necessarily transnational. | Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology (PhD) |