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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 |
|---|---|---|
| Peck, Jamie | Department of Geography | Social and economic geography; Socio-Economic Conditions; Economic geography |
| Pennefather, Patrick | Department of Theatre & Film | theatre design; Theatre Production; digital media; Public VR projects; xR development; Scalable virtual and augmented reality prototypes; Rapid prototyping for mixed realities; Design of spatial audio in physical and virtual environments |
| Perla, Jesse | Vancouver School of Economics | macro-economics and growth from the perspective of the firm, with an emphasis |
| Perley, Bernard | Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies | Linguistic anthropology; Performance and installation art; Critical identity, ethnic and race studies; Linguistic Anthropology; Indigenous studies; Language Revitalization |
| Peters, Michael | Vancouver School of Economics | micro theory, especially the theory of competing mechanisms, and the theory of directed search |
| Philbrick, Rachel | Department of Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies | Classical literatures; Latin poetry; Greek poetry; genre; Textual authority and credibility; Intertextuality |
| Philip, Kavita | Department of English Language and Literatures | Humanities and the arts; Colonial and Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies; STS; HCI; History of Science and Technology; Cold War Science |
| Piechocki, Katharina | Department of French, Hispanic & Italian Studies | Seventeenth-century French literature, Early modern French and Romance literature, Theater, opera, cartography, gender, affect, and translation studies |
| Pierre, Jemima | Institute for Gender, Race, Sex and Social Justice | relationship of political economy to race; migration, transnationalism, and diaspora; ethics and politics of western knowledge production and disciplinary formation |
| Pina Baldoquin, Manuel | Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory | Images |
| Pohl-Weary, Emily | School of Creative Writing | Fiction; Writing for Youth |
| Porto, Nuno | Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory | Self-representation of African identities in contemporary Afro-Cuban Art and in Kenyan photography, Modern and contemporary arts of Africa and the African Diasporas, Curatorship and social justice, Social museology, History of collections, Photography |
| Poudrier, Eve | School of Music | Music theory; Theories of rhythm and meter, with a special emphasis on temporal multiplicity and twentieth-century music; Music cognition, especially rhythm, expertise, and cross-cultural issues; Schenkerian analysis |
| Powers, Bradley | Department of Theatre & Film | Production Technology |
| Prange, Sebastian | Department of Asian Studies | History, maritime trade, Indian Ocean, India, piracy, Islam |
| Pratt, Geraldine | Department of Geography | Feminist Geographies |
| Price, Richard | Department of Political Science | Political science; International Cooperation; Ethics and World Politics; Global Norms; international relations; International Relations Theory; Moral Psychology |
| Prueitt, Cat | Department of Philosophy | Epistemology and Methodology; Asian Philosophy; Metaphysics; Philosophy of Language; Philosophy of mind/cognitive science |
| Puar, Jasbir | Institute for Gender, Race, Sex and Social Justice | |
| Pulleyblank, Douglas | Department of Linguistics | Linguistics; Phonology; Morphology; African languages; Yoruba |
| Qian, Yue | Department of Sociology | Sociology; family; Gender Relationship; Migrations, Populations, Cultural Exchanges; Demography; Family Studies; Gender Studies; sociology |
| Quirk, Paul | Department of Political Science | United States Politics, US Politics, American Politics, Congress, Presidency, US elections, US politics |
| Raftery, James | School of Music | opera; baritone; tenor |
| Raibmon, Paige | Department of History | first nations on the northwest coast, cultural representations, relocation of aboriginal peoples, environmental health on reserves, first nations history, Indigenous people and colonisation, life writing and life history |
| Raker, Ethan | Department of Sociology | Social sciences; Social demography; sociology of health; Climate/environmental sociology; Sociology of disasters |
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. Dramkin investigated how we map number words to perceptual magnitudes. Her work shows that by understanding the shared logic between number words and perceptual scales, young children can readily attach number words to their perception of number, length, and area, and even perform intuitive mathematic computations (e.g., division). | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Akinwumi investigated the concept of forgetting in postcolonial African and Caribbean literatures. He argues that forgetting is at once a tool of oppression and survival. To be sure, his analysis deepens our insight into the workings of forgetting and helps us to grasp more clearly how the equilibrium between memory and forgetting is achieved. | Doctor of Philosophy in French (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Gallagher examined the visual and musical features of pastoral landscapes (forests and fields) and anti-pastoral areas (ruins and caves) in the video games Final Fantasy X, XII, XIII, and XV. Her research shows that music significantly impacts players' perceptions of these areas, making them feel more relaxed and apprehensive, respectively. | Doctor of Philosophy in Music, Emphasis Musicology (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Sutherland investigated the complex lived experiences of trans men, trans women, and nonbinary people, with a focus on intergroup dynamics, healthcare challenges, and strategies of resilience. His findings showcase how these populations are navigating stigma-related barriers and working to improve their health outcomes. | Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Ebrahimi Kahou has developed methods to offer solutions to tackle high-dimensional dynamic models in economics, utilizing insights from economic theory. The methodology utilizes a symmetry commonly found in many heterogenous agent models in economics. This work can be used to study more realistic models of income and wealth distributions. | Doctor of Philosophy in Economics (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Stewart's thesis investigates how the perception of mind in inanimate entities affects moral judgments. His studies suggest that perceiving the 'mind' of such objects, ideas, and emotions can shape our moral decisions and emotional regulations. These insights have implications for advancing our understanding of human moral psychology. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Schmalor's research shows that subjective SES and economic inequality influence self-centeredness. High inequality and high SES both make people more self-centered, and the gap in self-centeredness between high and low SES is bigger when inequality is high. This suggests that the selfishness of the rich depends on their economic environment. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Liu has shown the poetics of pidgin in Chinese literature. She challenges the stigmas associated with this language, emphasizing its aesthetics that embrace ambiguities and invite diverse interpretations. Through pidgin, her study reconfigures understandings of transcultural interaction and bridges Sinophone and Anglophone literatures. | Doctor of Philosophy in Asian Studies (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Mercadante's research provides evidence to suggest that one reason why greedy people always want more and are never satisfied with what they own is because they feel a brief boost of pride upon acquisition, such that the act of acquiring something is a highly positive emotional experience, but owning the item afterward does not elicit pride. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Pon composed a piece of orchestral music inspired by her early years with her child. Through the musical evocations and structure, she explored the mother-child-bond and related ideas like attachment, interconnection, awareness, time, and transience. Her work makes explicit a process of artistically realizing these human themes. | Doctor of Musical Arts in Composition (DMA) |