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Review details about the recently announced changes to study and work permits that apply to master’s and doctoral degree students. Read more
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Mikami, Amori | Department of Psychology | peer relationships; friendships; peer rejection; bullying; social skills training; social networking; Facebook; attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder; ADHD; children; adolescents, Ways in which a supportive classroom or home environment can help children to make friends, Designing and evaluating interventions that train teachers or parents in strategies to assist children with peer problems |
| Miller, Bradley | Department of History | Historical studies; British Empire History; Canadian history; Criminal Justice History; International Law and International Relations; legal history; North American History; Political History |
| 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 |
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 |
|---|---|---|
| 2023 | Dr. Vega Acuna studied, using a field experiment, how leadership roles can improve the academic performance and social integration of low-income students at a top university in Peru. He also shows how low-income students, during the Covid-19 online classes period, faced more difficulties to score higher grades than other students. | Doctor of Philosophy in Economics (PhD) |
| 2023 | Nikolai Medtner was a Russian composer whose large contribution to the art song genre has gone mostly unnoticed. Dr. Stanyer looks at how Medtner set complex Russian and German poetry to music, and how he communicated text and meaning through music. This research will be beneficial to future performers of these wonderful art songs to aid in interpretation. | Doctor of Musical Arts in Piano (DMA) |
| 2023 | Dr. Takano explored how massive population movements around the turn of the fifteenth century influenced Chinese literature by analyzing the writings of Li Dongyang (1447-1516). He found that Li expressed a conflicted geographic identity as a descendant of migrants sandwiched between his ancestral hometown and his place of residence in Beijing. | Doctor of Philosophy in Asian Studies (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Jewell's research took place in Florida (2019-2020). They argue that everyday experiences of the climate crisis are tied up within cultures of denial and control that have historically served a white supremacist status quo. Responsibly mitigating climate impacts requires reckoning with this, lest they become part of a "new," horrific normal. | Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. van der List studies how the economy interacts with geographic space. She has shown that firms trade off labor-market power and productivity spillovers when choosing a location. Her research has implications for the design of government subsidies affecting specific locations. | Doctor of Philosophy in Economics (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Li explored the dynamics of ocean extreme temperature events, Marine Heatwaves, and their ecological impacts. Her work improves our understanding of the historical and future changes in multiple novel heat stress characteristics globally, and also demonstrates the protective impacts of "training" heat stress conditions on global coral reefs. | Doctor of Philosophy in Geography (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Soo examined the perception, recognition and encoding of pronunciation variants in an ongoing Cantonese sound change. Borrowing psycholinguistic paradigms from dialect/language variation, her work offers a contemporary perceptual account of the sound change, showing that listeners distinguish and flexibly map multiple pronunciations to a word. | Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Desideri reflects on a set of artistic practices which, rather than creating objects, create the conditions for collaborative thinking and making, that is called study. Her Studio Practice proposes a novel approach to artmaking as study and to study as artmaking. | Doctor of Philosophy in Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Roy examined Museum of Vancouver's reorientation to a public engagement focussed institution from 2006 to 2016. Despite resource limitations, museum staff developed new relationships with local community members and audiences. Dr. Roy reveals important insights into the challenges faced by city museums adopting participatory approaches. | Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Markovic examined unchosen transformative experiences, particularly transformative grief, an experience that deeply alters a person's sense of what is significant in the world and calls on them to reorganize themselves as an agent. Her research links challenges to identity and agency in transformative grief with those of other major life events. | Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy (PhD) |