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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 |
|---|---|---|
| Siddiqui, Hasan Zahid | Department of Asian Studies | Early Modern South Asia |
| Silva, Tony | Department of Sociology | |
| Silver, Erin | Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory | Art history and theory; Curatorial and related studies; Visual arts and media arts; Activism and visual culture; Artist or Author Social Identity; Artistic and Literary Marginality; Artistic and Literary Movements, Schools and Styles; Canadian contemporary art; Feminist art histories; Movement culture; Performance studies; Queer art; social movements |
| Silverberg, Noah | Department of Psychology | Psychology and cognitive sciences; Cognitive rehabilitation; Concussion; Functional neurological disorder; Implementation Science; Metacognition; Neuropsychological assessment methods; Psychosocial determinants of health in neurological disorders; Traumatic Brain Injury |
| Simchen, Ori | Department of Philosophy | Philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of law |
| Sin, Nancy | Department of Psychology | Psychology and cognitive sciences; stress; Well-being; Adult development and aging; Social Aspects of Aging; Positive Emotions; Sleep; Health Promotion; social determinants of health; Health behaviours; Lifestyle Determinants and Health |
| Sinnamon, Luanne Silvia | School of Information | Human information behaviour (including human information retrieval); Web search; Information retrieval; 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 |
| 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 |
| Soon, Isaac | Department of Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies | Early Christianity and New Testament |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| Sultan, Nazmul | Department of Political Science | Political science; history of political thought; empire and anticolonial thought; popular sovereignty; modern conceptions of the global |
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. Press examined the role of persuasion in medical settings and scientific writing. She showed how a patient's positionality can impact how that person is treated in medical encounters, and how discrimination can lead to differential health outcomes. Her research shows the value of applying narrative and rhetorical approaches to health studies. | Doctor of Philosophy in English (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Zhumatova developed a policy index that measures the scope of mainstreaming, a policy of immigrant integration, across European states. She used the index and other data to examine if mainstreaming helps immigrants find employment. Her research contributes to a better understanding of whether immigrant integration policies work. | Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Huijsmans investigated a set of small words with grammatical functions in ?ay?aj u¸Ym (Comox-Sliammon; Central Salish). These encode information about utterance type, source of evidence, speaker certainty, and broader discourse context. This research contributes to documentation available to future language learners, teachers, and researchers. | Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Mukherji shows how the entry of immigrants in the local labour markets can impact market institutions like unions. He also examines how economic conditions both in their source economy and in the market of entry can affect their labour supply decisions. | Doctor of Philosophy in Economics (PhD) |
| 2023 | Foreign investment can benefit the recipient economy. Dr. Burzo examined empirically the political and economic aspects that influence the destination of foreign investments. His findings contribute to policy discussions on the redefinition of the international investment regime, particularly in relation to developing countries. | Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Angsongna's work explored the word structure and the sound system of Dagaare, a language spoken in northwestern Ghana. His research showed how words are formed and how they differ in the expression of grammatical meanings. This research contributes to the documentation of the language and to the development of linguistic theory. | Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Shankar explored practices with immigration data in Canada. Findings emphasize difference, interdependence, and the need for negotiation of responsibilities across groups working with immigration data. Her work offers implications to governmental and non-governmental actors for ethical decision making and the use of communities' data with care. | Doctor of Philosophy in Library, Archival and Information Studies (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Zhang studies online gamblers' betting behavior, examining how prior wins/losses affect ones' future betting. She identifies high-risk gamblers based on their behavior and develops interventions to reduce bets, improving prevention and intervention for gambling disorder | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Bercovici examined how neural activity in the prefrontal cortex supports behavioural flexibility. She showed that prefrontal neurons convey distinctive information for guiding choices during different phases of the decision-action sequence. Her research reveals how neural activity in this region shapes animals' perception of the decision context. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Desmarès studies patterns of discrimination in key citizenship policies adopted after World War II in France and Switzerland. She finds that new policies (re)introduced discriminatory provisions based on gender, race, ability status, and one's mode of nationality acquisition. Her work highlights the limits and drifts of liberal citizenship. | Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science (PhD) |