Photo: Martin Dee
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Ramana, M. V. | School of Public Policy and Global Affairs | Public administration; Public policy; Public security policy; arms control; Energy transitions; degrowth; nuclear disarmament; nuclear energy; nuclear policy; political economy of energy; risk of nuclear accidents |
| Ramankutty, Navin | School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, Institute for Resources, Environment & Sustainability | Natural environment sciences; Public administration; Public policy; Public security policy; Agriculture; Climate Changes and Impacts; Climate impacts; Environment and Society; Global food security; Land use change; Sustainable agriculture |
| Rankin, Catharine | Department of Psychology | Effects of experience early in development on adult behaviour and the nervous system, adult learning and memory |
| Rea, Christopher | Department of Asian Studies | Chinese literatures; Asian history; Chinese literature; Cinema; Print culture; translation; Humor |
| Rehavi, M. | Vancouver School of Economics | Economics; Law; Health Care Organization; Public Finances and Taxation; Algorithms; applied econometrics; criminal law; decision support (algorithms); discrimination; maternal health |
| Riano-Alcala, Pilar | Institute for Gender, Race, Sex and Social Justice | Lived experience of violence, Historical Memory and the politics of commemoration and witnessing, Forced migration (internal displacement and refuge), Critical and participatory methodologies, Community organizing, everyday resistance and social repair, Public art |
| Richardson, Alan Walter | Department of Philosophy | History of philosophy of science in early twentieth century |
| Richardson, Lindsey | Department of Sociology | Sociology of health and illness, substance use, HIV/AIDS, urban health, sociology of work and economic life, health disparities |
| Rieger, Caroline | Department of Central, Eastern & Northern European Studies | Laughter in interaction, education for global citizenship, translation, language assessment, learning of a third language in a second language environment |
| Rights, Jason | Department of Psychology | R-squared measures and methods for multilevel models; unappreciated consequences of conflating level-specific effects in analysis of multilevel data; delineating relationships between multilevel models and other commonly used models; advancing model selection and comparison methods for latent variable models |
| Rizzotti, Patrick | Department of Theatre & Film | Performing arts; design; Design and Planning of Space; Theatrical Productions; Virtual Reality; Augmented reality; design for new works; devised work; narrative visual experience; production design; site specific experiences; theatre design |
| Robertson, Leslie | Department of Anthropology | Indigenous and settler historiographies, colonial regimes of difference, spectacle and narrative, and political histories of resistance in settler nations, afterlife of historical colonialism, forms of power and representation in the context of urban marginalization (drug use, sex work, health, and violence) |
| Robinson, Dylan | School of Music | Indigenous Arts |
| Roosa, John | Department of History | Historical studies; Social Organization and Political Systems; Human Rights and Liberties, Collective Rights; Foreign Affairs; History of Indonesia |
| Rosenberg, Jordy | Department of English Language and Literatures | |
| Rosenblum, Daisy | Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies, Department of Anthropology | multi-modal documentation and description of indigenous languages of North America, with an emphasis on methods, partnerships, and products that contribute to community-based language revitalization |
| Ross, Alexander | School of Information | political economy of communication; contingent media; convergence of media industries on digital platforms |
| Rouse, Robert | Department of English Language and Literatures | Medieval Literatures; Environment, space and place |
| Rowley, Susan | Department of Anthropology, Department of Anthropology | Anthropology, n.e.c.; repatriation; museums; material culture; Cultural Heritage; arctic archaeology; heritage management |
| Roy, Marina | Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory | Intersection between materials, history, language, and ideology |
| Rullmann, Hotze | Department of Linguistics | Linguistics; Semantics |
| Rusk, Bruce | Department of Asian Studies | Asian history; Literary or Artistic Work Analysis; Social Determinants of Arts and Letters; Arts and Cultural Traditions; Exegesis and Sacred Text Critics; Lexicography and Dictionaries; Authentication Studies; Confucianism; Early Modern China; material culture |
| Safieddine, Hicham | Department of History | Political economy and intellectual history (19th and 20th centuries), Political Economy of the Middle East, Modern Arab and Islamic Thought, Economic Thought and Theory, Global Financial Order, Currency Regimes, Private Banking, and Colonial Finance |
| Saggio, Raffaele | Vancouver School of Economics | Labour Economics; Alternate Work Arrangements; applied econometrics; Matched employer-employee datasets |
| Salamon, Anne | Department of French, Hispanic & Italian Studies | Literatures in French outside Quebec; French language; Historical linguistics, diachronics, and dialectology; Romance Philology; Medieval French Litterature; Manuscript studies; History of the French language; Critical editing of medieval texts |
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. Engstrom explored how someone's social class affects how much we trust them. She found people see lower-class people as more moral - but they also implicitly associate low social class with immorality, and believe lower-class people are more tempted by financial need to betray trust. This research shows the complexity of class stereotypes. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Girija explored the history of an Indian port city of Calicut to show that contrary to long held beliefs, the city remained a dynamic commercial hub outside of European colonial system. In fact her work shows that the notion of Calicut's supposed decline has been an artefact of Eurocentricism which continues to shape scholarship up to this day. | Doctor of Philosophy in History (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Stirling Hill examined the relationship between literary and legal constructions of female voice in medieval England and France. Her research considers the intersection between history and fiction, and shows how the literal policing of women's voices became a literary trope that worked to devalue women's voices in society. | Doctor of Philosophy in English (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Luo examined the underlying cognitive mechanisms of behavioural interventions. He developed a framework that organizes interventions according to cognitive principles and helps inform the design and development of future interventions based on cognitive insights. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Klein studied moral intuition's impact on experts' conceptualizations of international order via interviews, establishing that moral foundations influence their notions of change, progress, and threat. This substantiates the idea that moral intuition shapes both the scholars' theoretical leanings and the practitioners' foreign policy stances. | Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Simpson examined the critical reception of video art in the 1970s. Focusing on a landmark and contentious essay diagnosing video as inherently narcissistic, he unpacked the stakes and consequences of this conclusion. The result is an argument for video as an instrument to critically examine expanded forms of clinical thinking and living. | Doctor of Philosophy in Art History (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Williams' thesis oratorio, Sprinkle Coal Dust on my Grave, is based on the West Virginia Mine Wars. Using a mixture of classical and Appalachian musical styles, Williams depicts a violent period of U.S. labor history, employing texts taken from witness testimony as well as songs and poems of the era. | Doctor of Musical Arts in Composition (DMA) |
| 2023 | Dr. Stephens examined caricature within popular Parisian magazines of mid-19th century France. A major theme in his analysis is how caricaturists secretly used embedded worker's slang to carry hidden messages to evade censorship. His research significantly expands our understanding of the work of artist Honoré Daumier. | Doctor of Philosophy in Art History (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Jelsing examined Indigenous and settler colonial visions of the future as they were articulated through prophecy in two nineteenth-century North American "northwests". He showed how these prophecies expressed divergent modes of relationship that help us understand how settler colonialism unfolded in these two distinct places. | Doctor of Philosophy in History (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Brake's work focuses on friendships and social relationships among adults diagnosed with autism. His research helps us in understanding the life and social experiences of autistic people and the physical, social, and emotional challenges that they face in their daily lives. | Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology (PhD) |