Shoshana Schwebel
Doctor of Philosophy in Germanic Studies (PhD)
Metaphors of Trauma in German Cultural Texts
Canadian Immigration Updates
Review details about the recently announced changes to study and work permits that apply to master’s and doctoral degree students. Read more
The Faculty of Arts at UBC brings together the best of quantitative research, humanistic inquiry, and artistic expression to advance a better world. Graduate students in the Faculty of Arts create and disseminate knowledge in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Creative and Performing Arts through teaching, research, professional practice, artistic production, and performance.
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.
Research Centres
Research Facilities
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.
Research Highlights
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.
Schools / Departments
School
Department
Graduate Degree Programs
Research Supervisors in Faculty
or browse the list of faculty members in various academic units. You may click each unit to view faculty members appointed in that unit. View the full faculty member directory for more search and filter options.
| Name | Academic Unit(s) | Research Interests |
|---|---|---|
| LeMoult, Joelle | Department of Psychology | Neurosciences, biological and chemical aspects; Neurosciences, medical and physiological and health aspects; Psychology and cognitive sciences; depression and psychobiological responses to stress; understanding how depression develops and unfolds across the lifespan |
| Levell, Nicola | Department of Anthropology | interdisciplinary folds of anthropology, theoretical museology, material culture and critical curatorial studies |
| Li, Wei | Vancouver School of Economics | Contract theory, applied game theory, and information economics I am deeply interested in the interaction of information and incentives in various economics and political environments |
| Li, Hao | Vancouver School of Economics | Microeconomic theory, theory of contracts and organizations, and games and decisions |
| Li, Xiaojun | Department of Political Science | International relations; Comparative politics; International Political Economy; International Security; Foreign Policy Analysis |
| Lightfoot, Sheryl | Department of Political Science, School of Public Policy and Global Affairs | Indigenous policy and policy administration; Indigenous politics; global and comparative Indigenous politics; international relations; Human Rights; non-state actors |
| Liu, Tina | Department of Geography | Atmospheric pollution and air quality; Earth system sciences; Natural hazards; Climate change impacts and adaptation; Environmental geography; modern human-fire relationships; role of fire in the Earth system; impacts of extreme events on planetary health; air quality and public health; satellite remote sensing and big geospatial data |
| Liu, Siyuan | Department of Theatre & Film | twentieth century Chinese theatre and Asian Canadian theatre |
| Logan, Tricia | Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies | residential school history |
| Loo, Tina | Department of History | Environmental history of Canada |
| Lopes, Dominic | Department of Philosophy | Aesthetics |
| Lowe, Matthew | Vancouver School of Economics | preference formation; social integration; political selection |
| Lynn, Hyung Gu | Department of Asian Studies | Asian history; popular culture, migration, colonialism, globalization, development |
| Lyon, Annabel | School of Creative Writing | Novels, stories and news |
| Macfarlane, Allison | School of Public Policy and Global Affairs | Research, science and technology policy; science and technology policy; energy policy, nuclear energy, nuclear waste management; regulation |
| Mackie, Gregory | Department of English Language and Literatures | Victorian Literature, drama, and book history |
| Maghbouleh, Neda | Department of Sociology | Migration, Race, and Identity; Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) communities; race; Racialization; Im/migration; identity |
| Mahtani, Minelle | Institute for Gender, Race, Sex and Social Justice | critical mixed race theory; cultural forgetting; Social justice |
| Maillard, Keith | School of Creative Writing | Fiction, poetry |
| Main, Jessica | Department of Asian Studies | Buddhism, Ethics, and Human Rights; Modern Buddhist Institutions, Law, and Governance; Buddhists and Buddhist Institutions Active in Modern Society: Social Welfare; Healthcare and Healing; Protest Movements; Rehabilitation, Incarceration and Corrections; Youth Culture, Physical Culture, and Scouting; Modern Japanese Religions and Society; Japanese True Pure Land Buddhism |
| Makris, Georgios | Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory | Arts of Byzantium; Material culture and archaeology of monasticism; Dissemination and usage of portable objects across the eastern Mediterranean; Medieval monastic culture |
| Malakaj, Ervin | Department of Central, Eastern & Northern European Studies | Literature and literary studies; German studies; German Film Studies; German Media Studies; German Media History; Queer Theory and Queer Studies; Feminist and Queer Film Historiography; Critical Pedagogy |
| Maler, Anabel | School of Music | Humanities and the arts; music and disability studies; music in Deaf culture; music perception; embodiment and gesture; post-tonal form; intersections of music theory, musicology, and ethnomusicology |
| Mallipeddi, Ramesh | Department of English Language and Literatures | Restoration and Eighteenth-Century British Literature |
| Mansoor, Jaleh | Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory | Art history and theory; Curatorial and related studies; Visual arts and media arts; Cultural Industries; Formalism; Marxism and Critical Theory; Marxist Feminism; Modernism; Twentieth Century European Art |
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Recent Publications
This is an incomplete sample of recent publications in chronological order by UBC faculty members with a primary appointment in the Faculty of Arts.
Recent Thesis Submissions
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The Arthur of the March of Wales (ENGL - PHD)
Doctoral Citations
A doctoral citation summarizes the nature of the independent research, provides a high-level overview of the study, states the significance of the work and says who will benefit from the findings in clear, non-specialized language, so that members of a lay audience will understand it.
| Year | Citation | Program |
|---|---|---|
| 2024 | Why volunteer to help others fix items that are easy to replace? Dr. Kaczmarek explored the motivations and aspirations of volunteers at community repair events, as well as the impact of COVID-19 on their activities. Her research reveals the social and material value of repair through the stories of those involved. | Doctor of Philosophy in Library, Archival and Information Studies (PhD) |
| 2024 | Dr. Lacelle-Webster studied the work and experience of hope in democratic politics. Drawing on Hannah Arendt and contemporary democratic theory, he proposes a theoretical account of democratic hope that depends on and deepens political practices and spaces, empowering political agents to define possibility as an open, shared, and worldly phenomenon. | Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science (PhD) |
| 2024 | Dr. Secco analyzed the long-run impact of historical events in Brazil. His research focused on how territorial divisions during colonial Brazil have persistent consequences on the size of government and the delivery of public services depending on whether a colonizer was a public or private agent. | Doctor of Philosophy in Economics (PhD) |
| 2024 | Dr. Adebara's research on Afrocentric Natural Language Processing enables artificial intelligence technologies for 517 African languages and language varieties. This ensures that millions of African people have access to technologies in their Indigenous languages. | Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics (PhD) |
| 2024 | Dr. Beljaars studied the evolution of salsa in the Netherlands, exposing Antillean influences on Dutch culture. She also examined interactions in the Afro-Latin dance scene, illuminating the complexities of identity and belonging in Dutch postcolonial society and emphasizing the criticality of race in understanding Dutch cultural citizenship. | Doctor of Philosophy in Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice (PhD) |
| 2024 | Dr. Weiner examined how rebel groups adapt to shifts in the strategic environment during long conflicts. Focusing on the Syrian civil war, he found that leader turnover reduced group battlefield performance but not overall violence, while revenue shocks led groups to tax people in their territory more rather than increase looting. | Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science (PhD) |
| 2024 | Dr. Ewé studied sound art since the 1960s, with a focus on artists who use sonic technologies to examine the role of the listener. They investigated how artists used cybernetics research to challenge the notion of the ear as a passive receiver of sound. Their dissertation contributes to the ongoing research in the history and theory of sound art. | Doctor of Philosophy in Art History (PhD) |
| 2024 | Dr. Wee studied how social media and poetry could be understood as two complementary ways of mediating identity, particularly when it comes to race. Though social media is often thought of as a new radical technology, Dr. Wee's research showed that many of the problems and promises that originated in print culture continue on to the Internet. | Doctor of Philosophy in English (PhD) |
| 2024 | Dr. Gauvin studied photographs from the Great Depression held at the US Library of Congress. He examined how a subset of these photographs raise questions about the fragility of American ideals in the 1930s. This study presents these images as the missing link between early documentary photography in America and a competing Soviet documentary mode. | Doctor of Philosophy in Art History (PhD) |
| 2024 | Dr. Franz-Pattillo's research explores how inflation targets are set. It shows that these targets are influenced by various factors, including the level of commitment of policymakers. These insights help us understand the importance of institutions and their impact on our everyday lives. | Doctor of Philosophy in Economics (PhD) |