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 |
|---|---|---|
| 2009 | Dr. Fallon examined the politics of diasporas and their effect on the 'homeland' during and after armed conflict. She found that a diaspora's ability to influence is not primarily dependent on material resources but rather on ideational factors and relationships with transnational advocacy networks. | Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science (PhD) |
| 2009 | Dr. Huang examined how to capitalize research and development expenditures in the system of national accounts. She developed new methodologies to estimate the R&D depreciation rates and the net benefits of a R&D project. She also proposed a new way to incorporate R&D capital in a growth accounting framework. | Doctor of Philosophy in Economics (PhD) |
| 2009 | Dr. Nadeau explores empirically a class of macroeconomic models where expectation revisions can generate boom and bust cycles in economic activity. His work shows that this class of models finds considerable support in the data. | Doctor of Philosophy in Economics (PhD) |
| 2009 | Dr. Lane examined the cults of founders in the ancient Greek colonies of Italy. Her work reveals that the god Apollo was a symbolic founding-figure, while later re-founders of these cities, especially the tyrants, received cults for political purposes. Her work increases our understanding of ancient Greek colonial religion. | Doctor of Philosophy in Classics (PhD) |
| 2009 | Dr. Cyr found that embracing historicity is asserting the existence of a long-lasting link between past and present, and the fact that things could have been otherwise. It entails that we should look in the past in order to understand the present, and that current choices can take us along irreversible paths, impossible to erase, only to modify. | Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy (PhD) |
| 2009 | Dr. Buchtel examined cultural and individual differences in the experience of being motivated by duty. She found that people who endorsed Confucian values were more likely to enjoy doing their duty, suggesting that one?s culture can encourage external and internal motivation to work together?helping us ?want? to do what we ?ought? to do. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |
| 2009 | Dr. Salant studied how physical and biological factors influence the movement of fine particles suspended in flowing water. She demonstrated how interactions between small-scale plants, streambed structures, and flow conditions can alter particle deposition and local hydraulics - important factors that affect stream habitat and aquatic organisms. | Doctor of Philosophy in Geography (PhD) |
| 2009 | Dr. Sand studied different aspects of local wage determination in United States cities. His work shows the empirical importance of general equilibrium implications of wage setting, and demonstrated an important role for industrial composition in determining both the level of wages in localities as well as wage differences between groups. | Doctor of Philosophy in Economics (PhD) |
| 2009 | Dr. Poon examined business cycle asymmetries and optimal international monetary policy. She showed that firms? pricing decisions lead the economy to respond asymmetrically to monetary policies. She also found that fundamental analysis and external shocks affect an open economy's optimal monetary policy, which explain the policy in some emerging markets. | Doctor of Philosophy in Economics (PhD) |
| 2009 | Dr. Mizobuchi used two approaches to problems in capturing the general tendency of changes in commodity prices and quantities over time. This included analyzing factors leading to improvement in the living standard in Japan over 50 years. His research contributes to improved accuracy in the description and prediction of economic states and trends. | Doctor of Philosophy in Economics (PhD) |