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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.
| Name | Academic Unit(s) | Research Interests |
|---|---|---|
| Milligan, Kevin | Vancouver School of Economics | Labour and demographic economics; Public economics; Economic Policies; Children; Inequality; Pensions; Public Finance; Taxation |
| Milstein, Sara | Department of Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies | Classical Greek and Ancient Rome history; Classical archaeology; Classical linguistics; Religion and religious studies; biblical and cuneiform law; Hebrew Bible and Near Eastern Studies; History of Major Eras, Great Civilisations or Geographical Corpuses; literary history of the Bible; Literary or Artistic Works Analysis; Mesopotamian literature; Near Eastern scribal culture; Religious Contexts |
| Mitchell, Tamara | Department of French, Hispanic & Italian Studies | Literary or Artistic Work Analysis; Artistic and Literary Theories; Political Ideologies; Contemporary Mexican Literature and Culture; Neoliberalism, Globalization, (Post-)National Politics; Political Philosophy, Critical Theory; Border and Diaspora Studies; Contemporary Central American Literature and Culture; Digital Humanities; Sound Studies |
| Mitchell, Karice | Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory | Visual art |
| Mole, Christopher | Department of Philosophy | Philosophical issues that arise from the attempt to understand the mind scientifically, aesthetics of literature |
| Monteyne, Joseph | Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory | History of art and architecture; Visual theory, visual culture and visual literacy; Media studies (except social media and digital media); British history; Renaissance/early modern art and print culture; early modern landscape and eco-criticism |
| Montgomery, H. Monty | School of Social Work | Social work, n.e.c.; First Nations Child Welfare, Aboriginal Social Policy, Indigenous Distance Education |
| Moon, Seok Min | Vancouver School of Economics | public economics; Corporate Finance; the effects of capital gains taxes on firms’ investment; the spillover effects of political patronage on the allocation of bank credits in private markets; how firms’ market power affects their investment, capital structure, and employment decisions |
| Moore, Patrick | Department of Anthropology | Anthropological linguistics, languages of North America, sub-Arctic ethnography, ethno-history, gender, First Nations Languages, Literacy and Orality, Oral Traditions, Dene (Athbaskan Languages and Cultures), Codeswitching, Gender, Indigenous Activism, and the Anthropology of Media |
| Moran, Patrick | Department of French, Hispanic & Italian Studies | French language; Arts, Literature and Subjectivity; History of Major Eras, Great Civilisations or Geographical Corpuses; Popular Cultures Produced and Broadcasted by Media; Arthurian Romance; Cognitive Poetics; Comparative Medieval Literature; Genre Theory; Interactive Fiction; Material Philology; Medieval French Literature; Medieval Narrative Literature; Medievalism; Narrative Theory; Old French; Reader-Response Theory; Science Fiction and Fantasy |
| Morris, Leora | Department of Theatre & Film | Directing; Acting; New play development |
| Morton, David | Department of History | urban Africa; architecture and planning in history; informal settlement, housing, and citizenship; Mozambique in the twentieth century; Portuguese colonialism |
| Morzycki, Marcin | Department of Linguistics | Linguistics; adverbial modification; degree modifiers; expressive meaning; grammar of modification; knowledge of meaning; measure phrases; modification of quantifiers; nonrestrictive modification; semantic restrictions on modifier order; Semantics, syntax, and their interface |
| Moss, Laura | Department of English Language and Literatures | Humanities and the arts; Canadian Literatures; Postcolonial/ Decolonial/ Anticolonial Theories; Climate Fiction and Poetry; Environmental Humanities; Medical Humanities; Literary History |
| Mostow, Joshua Scott | Department of Asian Studies | Inter-relations between text and image, especially in Japanese culture, Japanese women |
| Mota, Miguel | Department of English Language and Literatures | Post-1945 British literature, print culture |
| Muehlmann, Shaylih | Department of Anthropology | Environmental politics, linguistic anthropology, drug trafficking, indigeneity, water scarcity, the anthropology of the awkward, US-Mexico borderlands, Mexico |
| Murphy, Anne | Department of History | Historical studies; Arts and Cultural Traditions; Religion; Early Modern Studies; Modern history; cultural history; Philosophy, History and Comparative Studies; Punjabi Studies; South Asian Studies |
| Myers, Tamara | Department of History | History of Children and Youth, Gender/Women’s History, History of Crime and Delinquency, History of Adolescence and the Family, Quebec/Canada |
| Nakamura, Fuyubi | Department of Asian Studies | Social and cultural anthropology; Museum studies (Museology); Visual theory, visual culture and visual literacy; Globalization and culture; Environment, space and place; Anthropology of art; museum studies (working as curator at the Museum of Anthropology at UBC); material and visual culture; Contemporary Japanese calligraphy; Indigenous cultures, especially Ainu; disaster and memory, especially in the context of the Great East Japan Earthquake (3.11).; contemporary Asian art and culture |
| Naqvi, Naveena | Department of Asian Studies | Persianate world; Non-courtly Persographic writers in regional contexts during early colonial rule; History of early modern and modern South Asia; History of political Islam; gender and sexuality; Hindustani music |
| Narayan, Priti | Department of Geography | Social and economic geography; urban development; South Asia; state-society relations |
| Nardizzi, Vin | Department of English Language and Literatures | Renaissance literature , ecotheory, queer and disability studies |
| Nathan, Lisa | School of Information | Social relations; Critical studies of technology; climate change adaptation; Indigenous Information Studies; Information Ethics & Policy |
| Nelson, Laura | Department of Sociology | Social movements, culture, gender, and organizations and institutions, Processes around the formation of collective identities, Social movement strategy in feminist and environmental movements, Continuities between cycles of activism and the role of place in shaping social movement activity, Intersectionality in U.S. women’s movements, Coverage of social movements in news media over time, Ways in which history is recorded and remembered, Gender inequality in startups and entrepreneurship |
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 |
|---|---|---|
| 2022 | Dr. Wu's doctoral study focuses on everyday life at Yinxu, the last Shang capital. The research explores the significance and relevance of daily practice, particularly how the actions of individuals were immensely involved in urban processes. It has significant implications for our understanding of the dynamics of urbanization in early China. | Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology (PhD) |
| 2022 | Dr. Figueiredo studied how context and agency affect Brazilian school children's information searching strategies to complete homework. She found that these strategies depend on school and home resources, and interpersonal assistance. Her analysis of information searching strategies provides recommendations for designing youth digital applications. | Doctor of Philosophy in Library, Archival and Information Studies (PhD) |
| 2022 | Dr. Lachapelle argued that an emerging way of science-making emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic, organized around preprint servers, challenging the traditional channel of scholarly communication, organized around academic peer-reviewed journals. These servers participate in a reversal of epistemic evaluators and the logic of scientific capital. | Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology (PhD) |
| 2022 | Dr. Ma examined a warlord based in a Korean island in the early seventeenth century when China underwent a dynastic transition. His study ably fills in the details of a part of this transition. It helps to break down approaches to history that focus on national binary conflicts without considering other nations and marginal players. | Doctor of Philosophy in Asian Studies (PhD) |
| 2022 | Dr. Blanc's dissertation focuses on writers who embarked on a journey of self-writing. She demonstrates the complexities of the subject who reclaims their identity through the exploration of a past marked by the absence of the parental figure. It reveals that all identities are a product of a multitude of stories: past, present, and future. | Doctor of Philosophy in French (PhD) |
| 2022 | Dr. Rojas Marchini traces new legal frameworks, markets and knowledges focused on managing and financing biodiversity in Chile, with attention to how the state relates to Indigenous people. She shows the pitfalls involved in this turn and the need for institutional transformation, providing an informed analysis for policymakers in the Global South. | Doctor of Philosophy in Geography (PhD) |
| 2022 | Dr. Nadarajah studied soft law's prevalence in the Arctic, Outer Space, and Climate Change while theorising this now ubiquitous aspect of international relations. This helps us better understand today's international system, how it has changed, and develops our understanding of the relationship between International Relations and International Law. | Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science (PhD) |
| 2022 | Dr. Tomkinson's research explores the theatrical relationship between sound and mental health differences. He examines a range of case studies in which audience members are immersed in auditory simulations of madness. His dissertation investigates the shortcomings of simulation as a representational practice. | Doctor of Philosophy in Theatre (PhD) |
| 2022 | Dr. Dwyer found that cash transfers improved housing stability and financial security for the homeless, and he quantified the well-being benefits of cash transfers across the global socioeconomic spectrum. His findings demonstrate that cash assistance may be an effective way to help those who are homeless or living in poverty. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |
| 2022 | Dr. Qiu studied how suicidal individuals construe death, and how different aspects of death construal relate to suicidal ideation and attempts. This research enhances understanding of the progression from suicidal thoughts to acts. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |