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. Johnston studied the politics of citizenship in the city of Ahmedabad, India. His work contributes to understanding the urban poor's negotiation of constitutional rights within the changing relationship between the Indian state and everyday life. | Doctor of Philosophy in Geography (PhD) |
| 2010 | Dr. Hennessy explored the use of new media by museums and anthropologists to create First Nations access to ethnographic collections from their communities. Using participatory methodologies, her research illuminated both the opportunities and tensions associated with the digitization of cultural heritage and the circulation of indigenous cultural property. | Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology (PhD) |
| 2010 | Dr. Turner studied the way in which families respond to health shocks and retirement incentives. Her research suggests that cooperation among household members can mitigate the economic effects of bad health outcomes and that the resulting gains are very sensitive to the degree of family cohesion. | Doctor of Philosophy in Economics (PhD) |
| 2010 | Dr. Wabnitz built ecological models to understand the role of green turtles in Pacific reef and Caribbean seagrass ecosystems, and developed new methods to map underwater habitats using satellite data. Her findings highlight sea turtles? importance to ecosystem resilience and the current lack of habitat data to meet international conservation targets. | Doctor of Philosophy in Geography (PhD) |
| 2010 | Dr. Banting investigated the local and not-so-local audiences addressed by fiction and theatre set in Vancouver. Her research demonstrated a new method for studying how novels, short stories, and plays set up relationships between people and places near and far. | Doctor of Philosophy in English (PhD) |
| 2010 | Dr. Dewar examined how the labels of infants' earliest objects are represented. She found that infants expect labels to refer to distinct object categories and she identified a learning mechanism through which infants' expectations of labeled objects may be acquired. This research illuminates the relationship between language and cognitive development. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |
| 2010 | Dr. Kim explored how the social communication technology, folksonomy, is changing the way people organize Web resources. This empirical study proposes a conceptual framework to recast a folksonomy as a Web classification, and to better understand users' perception and use of folksonomy in organizing Web resources. | Doctor of Philosophy in Library, Archival and Information Studies (PhD) |
| 2010 | Dr. Schoemaker Holmes investigated urban online dating practices in order to study the role of such new media in producing gendered selves. This research illuminates gendered dating inequalities and broadens feminist theories of love by illustrating how gender remains an organizing and oppressive force in everyday life. | Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology (PhD) |
| 2010 | Dr. Hsu examined sociocultural factors to understand why East Asians in North America report greater social anxiety compared to their Western counterparts. She found that social anxiety was related to experiencing conflict between East Asian culture and Western norms. This research highlights the need for culturally-sensitive treatment of social anxiety. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |
| 2010 | Dr. Peterson examined how speakers of Gitksan, an indigenous language in northern BC, linguistically encode the knowledge they have for the statements they make, and their attitude towards that knowledge. This research contributes to the documentation of an endangered language, and contributes to our theoretical understanding of evidentiality and modality. | Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics (PhD) |