Talia Morstead
Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD)
Stress, coping, and health: Examining intra- and interpersonal contributors
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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 |
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Berkman, Jeremy | Humanities and the arts; music; Music as Healing | |
Berryman, Sylvia | Department of Philosophy | Philosophy; Ancient Greek natural philosophy; Aristotle's ethics; ethics and global poverty; Philosophy, History and Comparative Studies |
Biesanz, Jeremy | Department of Psychology | personality, Personality, interpersonal perception, accuracy, personality coherence, quantitative methods |
Birch, Susan | Department of Psychology | Social perspective taking, social learning, social cognition, imitation, nonverbal behavior, confidence, communication, decision-making, impression formation, child development My primary area of expertise is the study of children and adults’ social perspective taking abilities (i.e., their abilities to reason about other peoples’ mental states–their intentions, knowledge, and beliefs) and how their abilities to take another person’s perspective impacts how they form impressions of others, learn from others, communicate with others, and informs a range of socials. Of particular interest is a) how children make inferences about what is credible information to learn (e.g., how they decide whether someone is a credible source of information based on how confident that person seems) and b) how a widespread bias in perspective taking referred to as ‘the curse of knowledge bias’ (a difficulty reasoning about a more naive perspective as the result of being biased by one’s current knowledge) can impair communication (both written and in person) and decision-making across a range of fields (politics, law, education, economics, medicine, etc.)., Development of language, learning, and social understanding in infants and children |
Blackburn, Carole | Department of Anthropology | relationship between Indigenous peoples and settler states; how Indigenous nations assert their rights and sovereignty in struggles over land and political recognition, and the consequences for Indigenous people of engaging states in legal and political arenas. |
Bloch, Alexia | Department of Anthropology | Social sciences; migration; Gender; Eurasia; Russia; ethnography |
Boccassini, Daniela | Department of French, Hispanic & Italian Studies | Italian Verbal and visual arts, mediterranean cultural exchanges |
Bochnak, Ryan | Department of Linguistics | |
Booker, Courtney | Department of History | Early medieval europe, histiography, rhetoric, narrative, hermeneutics, literary and textual critcism, latin philology, codicology, transmission of texts, and intertextuality, drama and performativity, politcal theology and l'augustinisme politique, medievalism |
Borwein, Sophie | Department of Political Science | intersection of political economy, political behaviour, and public policy |
Bostanci, Gorkem | Vancouver School of Economics | Macroeconomics (including monetary and fiscal theory); Industry economics and industrial organization; Firm Dynamics; Input Allocation and Productivity; Labor Demand; intellectual property |
Bouchard, Marie-Eve | Department of French, Hispanic & Italian Studies | Humanities and the arts; Sociolinguistics; Linguistic Anthropology; ethnography; language ideologies; Language and identity; migration; Language variation and change; Language contact; Creole languages |
Bourges, Antoine | Department of Theatre & Film | Film Production |
Bowers, Katherine | Department of Central, Eastern & Northern European Studies | Literature and literary studies; Arts, Literature and Subjectivity; Arts and Cultural Traditions; Arts and Technologies; Arts and Literary Policies; Dostoevsky; genre; gothic fiction; imagined geography; literary culture; narrative; Russian culture; Russian literature; the novel |
Brain, Robert | Department of History | History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, Modern European Cultural and Intellectual History |
Bratiotis, Christiana | School of Social Work | Social work; interventions in the context of hoarding; organizational processes involved in hoarding task forces; service utilization |
Briggs, Marlene | Department of English Language and Literatures | war and conflict; cultural transmission and reception of the First World War (1914-1918) in modern and contemporary British literature |
Britton, Dennis | Department of English Language and Literatures | early modern English literature, history of race, critical race theory, Protestant theology, history of emotion |
Brown, William | Department of Theatre & Film | film-philosophy, digital media, posthumanism, critical race theory |
Brownlee, Kimberley | Department of Philosophy | Philosophy; Applied Ethics; Ethics and Fundamental Issues of Law and Justice; Ethics and Health; Human Rights and Liberties, Collective Rights; Social Aspects of Aging; Belonging; Civil Disobedience and Conscientious Objection; Loneliness; Philosophy of Punishment; Social Human Rights; Virtues and Vices |
Brunner, Lisa | Higher education; Public policy; international migration; Higher Education; immigration; settler colonialism | |
Bryce, Benjamin | Department of History | Historical studies; Argentina; Canada; Education; health; migration; Race and ethnicity; The Americas; Transnational history |
Bullard, Julia | School of Information | Organization of information and knowledge resources; Library science and information studies; classification systems; Cultural Institutions (Museums, Libraries, etc.); Information Systems; metadata; values-in-design |
Burgess, Miranda | Department of English Language and Literatures | English language; Arts, Literature and Subjectivity; British and Irish Romanticism; history of feeling (affect, emotion, sensation); history of literary form; history of media and mediation; poetics; riparian and oceanic studies |
Byers, Michael | Department of Political Science | International relations; Public international law (except international trade law); international law; international relations; Outer Space; Arctic; Law of the Sea; Laws of War; International Human Rights; International Environmental Law |
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 | Political rallies have become a large part of electoral campaigns worldwide. What role do rallies play in shaping elections? Dr. Jha estimates a novel structural model of political rallies and their outcomes. He finds rallies persuasive and electorally pivotal in U.S and that the rallies in India are much more persuasive than in U.S. | Doctor of Philosophy in Economics (PhD) |
2023 | Dr. Pauker's cross-disciplinary work sketches intertwining genealogies of philosophy and journalism. Advocating philosophical journalism as a mode of critical questioning in the present, Pauker disrupts normative configurations of truth and truth-telling in journalism, philosophy, and knowledge production in the western tradition, more broadly. | Doctor of Philosophy in Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice (PhD) |
2023 | Dr. García Martínez developed the conceptual distinction between accumulation and cumulation. The former is a system of value built on the latter. He proposed that for our contemporary crisis, writing depicts a cumulation, a profuse pile-up, ever more resistant to the imposition of some kind of system of value. | Doctor of Philosophy in Hispanic Studies (PhD) |
2023 | Dr. Exler studied the hydrology of drained peatlands with a focus on how plant community shifts affect water exchange between the atmosphere and the peat body. His findings help understand how climate change may affect peatland ecohydrology, which is an integral part of ecosystem health in these environments that controls greenhouse gas release. | Doctor of Philosophy in Geography (PhD) |
2023 | How might we better alleviate poverty and mitigate inequality? Dr. Peng studied how satellite data reveals local political dynamics that impact developmental outcomes, how the success of global superpowers could influence the political attitudes of foreign citizens, and why those who qualify for social assistance might not take it up. | Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science (PhD) |
2023 | Dr. Khalis examined how social media usage and psychopathology impact one another. He found that certain aspects of social media usage can increase risk for depression, anxiety, and ADHD symptoms, and that psychopathology can also influence how we use social media. This research underscores the importance of mental health in the online context. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |
2023 | Dr. Liu examined the characteristics of the emerging pink market and the institutions within the pink economy in China. His research demonstrates how the state, sexuality, gender, sociocultural norms, and cultural trends shape market economies. | Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology (PhD) |
2023 | Dr. MacDonald examined a series of nineteenth-century representations of biofluids and epidemics to argue that authors used contagion metaphors in surprising ways - to articulate unexpected sites of contact, connection, and community. Her study contributes to modern conversations about how contagion can put us in touch in the post-COVID era. | Doctor of Philosophy in English (PhD) |
2023 | Dr. Lee explored how engaging in prosocial behavior, including acts of kindness and helping others, can help individuals restore their social connections. Her research suggests that an intervention promoting prosocial behavior is a promising approach to address loneliness and social isolation, particularly for individuals experiencing chronic loneliness. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |
2023 | Dr. Heard examined how the effectiveness of civilian harm response and compensation influences the ways in which the legitimacy of counterinsurgency operations are perceived by affected communities. This research illuminates the strategic role of survivor-centric approaches to harm mitigation and response in contemporary conflict. | Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science (PhD) |