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. Agov studied the international political economy of North Korea. His research reveals that North Korea's economic integration into the socialist system was greater than its ideology and politics of "self reliance" indicated. North Korea's external ties, though curtailed at times, made its unreformed domestic system more resilient than scholarship has previously indicated. | Doctor of Philosophy in History (PhD) |
| 2010 | Dr. Mudzingwa examined the sound patterns of Karanga and Zezuru, the principal dialects of Shona, a Bantu language of Zimbabwe. He demonstrated how Shona uses several interrelated strategies to achieve structures that are generally preferred in the world's languages: consonant-vowel (CV) syllables and a minimum word length of two syllables. | Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics (PhD) |
| 2010 | Dr. Shea developed new approaches for estimating weather variables that are required to model glacier melt. Using data collected in the southern Coast Mountains, he demonstrated that simple melt models may not be suitable for long-term simulations of glacier dynamics and evaluating the effects of climatic change on glacier-fed streams. | Doctor of Philosophy in Geography (PhD) |
| 2010 | Dr. Doucette examined the intersection of democratization and economic reform in South Korea. He revised existing research to show how political conflicts informed the democratic transition, but also hindered the creation of more participatory and egalitarian economic policies. | Doctor of Philosophy in Geography (PhD) |
| 2010 | Dr. Foley studied how socioeconomic status affects educational attainment among Canadian youth. She found that the value parents place on education is an important channel through which socioeconomic status operates. She also demonstrated that skilled but socioeconomically disadvantaged youth attend university more often if they live in highly educated neighbourhoods. | Doctor of Philosophy in Economics (PhD) |
| 2010 | Dr. Aviles identified and examined a long-overdue topic in modern Mexican history: the exceptional case of the manufacture of steam engines by a local firm during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This case study of technological translation overturned dominant understandings of mechanization premised upon the idea of the "transfer" of technology into Mexico while making an argument for the centrality of steam engines to modern Mexico. | Doctor of Philosophy in History (PhD) |
| 2009 | Dr. Rawn investigated whether self-control, a process normally considered virtuous, always leads to positive outcomes for the self. Her work suggests that some people force themselves to risk self-harm and discomfort when they expect to be liked by valued others as a result of taking that risk. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |
| 2009 | Dr. Deline investigated the political and legal roles of women in criminal trials in the Julio-Claudian era of the Roman Empire. She concluded that women were politically threatening and legally active in ways that show they were much more than merely extensions of their husbands and brothers. | Doctor of Philosophy in Classics (PhD) |
| 2009 | Dr. Chen found that across a range of parents with good and poor parenting skills, parenting disagreements between mothers and fathers are uniquely associated with greater behavior problems in preschool children. Her research helps us understand yet another important link between family functioning and child problems. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |
| 2009 | Dr. Puterman's work examines risky sexual behaviours in men who have sex with men. His findings indicate that people's motives for having sex are important to understanding whether they engage in or avoid condom use across time. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |