Michael Fabris (Krebs)
Doctor of Philosophy in Geography (PhD)
Assimilation, Place, and Indigenous Identity in the Era of Reconciliation
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Applicants to Master’s and Doctoral degrees are not affected by the recently announced cap on study permits. Review more details
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Sin, Nancy | Department of Psychology | Psychology and cognitive sciences; social determinants of health; stress; Social Aspects of Aging; Health Promotion; Lifestyle Determinants and Health; Adult development and aging; cardiovascular disease; depression; Emotions; Health behaviours; Stress processes; Well-being |
| Sinnamon, Luanne Silvia | School of Information | Archival, repository and related studies; Library science and information studies; human information interaction; Information Systems; information retrieval; New Technology and Social Impacts |
| Siu, Henry | Vancouver School of Economics | business cycle, recession, unemployment, Business cycles and the consequences of macroeconomic forces on the labour market |
| Slingerland, Edward | Department of Philosophy | Asian Studies, Chinese philosophy, philosophy, religion, religion and conflict, secularism, spontaneity, ethics, science-humanities integration, interdisciplinarity, interdisciplinary research, Chinese thought, religious studies (comparative religion, cognitive science and evolution of religion), cognitive linguistics (blending and conceptual metaphor theory), ethics (virtue ethics, moral psychology), evolutionary psychology, the relationship between the humanities and the natural sciences, and the classical Chinese language |
| Smilges, Logan | Department of English Language and Literatures | |
| Smith, Tai | Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory | History of art and architecture; Art theory and analysis; Visual theory, visual culture and visual literacy; Arts and Technologies; Economical Contexts; Gender; media theory; Modern and Contemporary Art and Design; Politics of Media and Mediation; Textiles |
| Snowberg, Erik | Vancouver School of Economics | Political economy; Behavioural Economics; Experimental Design; Data-Intensive Methods in Economics |
| Snyder, Jason | Department of Psychology | plasticity, learning, memory, stress, mental health, emotional behaviour |
| Solimine, Philip | Industry economics and industrial organization; Econometrics; Data-driven estimation, optimization, and control; Collaborative and social computing; Experimental economics | |
| Soma, Kiran | Department of Psychology | Neurosciences, biological and chemical aspects; Neurosciences, medical and physiological and health aspects; Psychology and cognitive sciences; Zoology; Behavior; Biological Behavior; Endocrinology; Neuroendocrine Diseases; Neuronal Communication and Neurotransmission; Neuronal Systems; neuroscience; stress |
| Song, Kyungchul | Vancouver School of Economics | Estimation of structural models based on interactions among economic agents |
| Soskuthy, Marton | Department of Linguistics | language change; Computational modeling; Statistics; Phonetics; Cognitive systems |
| Speller, Camilla | Department of Anthropology | Anthropology; Archeological Data Analysis; Molecular Genetics; Ancient DNA Analysis (paleogenetics); Ancient proteins (paleoproteomics); Animal Domestication; Bioarchaeology; Environmental Archaeology; Marine Ecosystems |
| Squires, Munir | Vancouver School of Economics | Development Economics, Firms and Productivity |
| Sriram, Veena | School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, School of Population and Public Health | Social sciences; Global health policy; Politics of policy processes; South Asian Studies; Governance; Health workers; power |
| Stainton, Timothy | School of Social Work | Developmental Disability, Disability, Social Policy, History of Developmental Disability, Philosophy of Welfare |
| Starling, Dan | Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory | |
| Stecklov, Guy | Department of Sociology | Family and household demographic studies; Fertility; Migration; Mortality; Demography; Studies of Canadian society; Demographic behavior; Historical social change; Demographic Change in Sub-Saharan Africa; Migration and assimilation; Population and Development; Research and survey methodology |
| Stephens, Christopher | Department of Philosophy | Philosophy; philosophy of biology; philosophy of science; rationality; scientific philosophy; Why be rational? |
| Stickles, Elise | Department of English Language and Literatures | English language; Mental Representation; grammar; Pragmatics; Semantics; Syntax; Imagery; Symbolism; Gestural, Verbal Communications; Public Communication; Data mining |
| Stratton, James | Department of English Language and Literatures | Linguistics; historical linguistics; Language variation and change |
| Sultan, Nazmul | Department of Political Science | Political science; history of political thought; empire and anticolonial thought; popular sovereignty; modern conceptions of the global |
| Sunar, Kiran | Department of Asian Studies | literature, religion, and culture in Punjab |
| Sundberg, Juanita | Department of Geography | Militarization and Everyday Life in the US-Mexico Borderlands, environmental dimensions of US's border security policies in the Mexican border |
| Sundstrom, Lisa | Department of Political Science | nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), global activism, human rights, Democratization, authoritarianism, civil society, Russian/ post-Communist politics, Western aid, and NGOs in global politics |
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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)
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Pidgin poetics : language culture in modern China (ASIA - 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 |
|---|---|---|
| 2021 | Dr. Hao studied the interaction in a dynamic game and the unobserved heterogeneity issue present in the data. She shows that during the initiation stage of collusion, firms learn to coordinate based on experience. She makes a contribution to the estimation process of panel regression and dynamic discrete choice models with unobserved heterogeneity. | Doctor of Philosophy in Economics (PhD) |
| 2021 | Dr. Liao studied the trans-imperial, colonial, and Cold War origins of the cultural politics of youth in Singapore between the 1940s and 1970s. He showed how imperial ambitions, colonial anxieties, nationalist aspirations, and global Cold War agendas converged to shape state-society relations, age-relations, and state-formation in modern Singapore. | Doctor of Philosophy in History (PhD) |
| 2021 | Dr. Na's study compared the efficacy of loving-kindness meditation, a novel intervention for reducing stigma of bipolar disorder, to an education-contact intervention. Results provide insight into the process of mental illness stigma reduction, by highlighting key intervention components, such as increase in knowledge and positivity toward others. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |
| 2021 | Dr. Walker studied the wholistic Cree political ethics that arises from an understanding of the land as okâwimâwaskiy or 'mother earth.' She argues that what okâwimâwaskiy teaches us is how regenerative political systems can be co-created through a wholistic compassionate, conscious care for all life. | Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science (PhD) |
| 2021 | Dr. Jaffe examined the experiences of research participants in a clinical trial for opioid use disorder. Her research illustrated how social and structural factors can shape the production of biomedical knowledge and identified strategies for improving the effective and ethical conduct of research with marginalized populations. | Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology (PhD) |
| 2021 | Dr. Dunkley's research examined sexual function in relation to eating disorder symptoms. Higher levels of disordered eating were associated with more sexual problems, and this relationship was partially explained by psychological traits, indicating that shared etiological factors that may underlie both sexual concerns and disordered eating. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |
| 2021 | Dr. Gonzalez examined the use of the sostenuto pedal in the piano works of the Italian pianist and composer Ferruccio Busoni. He argues that Busoni expanded the pedalling technique of the piano by finding new ways to sustain and release tones. | Doctor of Musical Arts in Piano (DMA) |
| 2021 | Dr. White investigated the psychological causes and consequences of belief in karma and belief in God. She studied how diverse supernatural justice beliefs can be produced by the combination of intuitive cognitive tendencies and cultural factors, and she documented how these beliefs shape social cognition, moral psychology, and prosocial behaviour. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |
| 2021 | Dr. Saffer's research found that thoughts of suicide emerge due to people experiencing psychological pain and hopelessness, and that suicide attempts are far more likely to occur when a person has knowledge and access to lethal means. His research provides important treatment implications for helping people with suicidal thoughts and behaviours. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |
| 2021 | Dr. Cockram's research explored the relationship between epistemic contextualism - roughly, the view that the word 'knows' is context-sensitive - and testimony as a source of knowledge. He argued that adopting a contextualist view of testimonial knowledge can help us solve outstanding puzzles in the epistemology of testimony. | Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy (PhD) |