Judith Valerie Engel
Doctor of Musical Arts in Piano (DMA)
Who is heard? Canadian Women Composers and the legacy of ‘genius’ Music
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 |
---|---|---|
Bergmann, Luke | Department of Geography | Social and economic geography; Geomatics; Globalization |
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 |
Bloemraad, Irene | Department of Political Science | Political science; Sociology; migration & mobilities - politics, law, social movements; immigrants and refugees - integration & incorporation; comparative research design & mixed methods |
Boccassini, Daniela | Department of French, Hispanic & Italian Studies | Italian Verbal and visual arts, mediterranean cultural exchanges |
Bochnak, Ryan | Department of Linguistics | Linguistics; Semantics; linguistic fieldwork |
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 |
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; subject indexing; Cultural Institutions (Museums, Libraries, etc.); Information Systems; metadata |
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 |
---|---|---|
2024 | Dr. Jiang's concise teaching guide for early Chinese National opera is easily accessible for non-Chinese speaking opera singers. Through this guide, singers can rapidly acquire the skills needed to perform early Chinese national opera works. This study paves the way for non-Chinese opera singers to interpret early Chinese national opera works. | Doctor of Musical Arts in Voice (DMA) |
2024 | Dr. Jerowsky compared the efficacy of VR, AR, and outdoor field trips when promoting the critical environmental education of children who have different levels of walking access to quality green space. His findings suggest that immersive media can help to address a lack of access while promoting environmental literacy and a diverse range of knowledges. | Doctor of Philosophy in Geography (PhD) |
2024 | Dr. Sacchi de Carvalho researched how labour markets function, focusing on how wages are determined, and the roles of firms and employees in production. His results will help policymakers and the public understand wage inequality and labour market dynamics. | Doctor of Philosophy in Economics (PhD) |
2024 | Parent-adolescent disputes tend to be seen through a lens of child noncompliance and parental control. Dr. Ji's studies challenge this view by examining resistance in parent-adolescent interactions at the dyadic level of analysis. He then tested a training he developed showing that social work students can be trained to see conflict complexly. | Doctor of Philosophy in Social Work (PhD) |
2024 | Dr. De Souza developed a theoretical framework locating allyship as a social phenomenon. In several empirical studies, Dr. De Souza compared reactive and proactive efforts to improve women's workplace experiences, illustrating the importance of a multiple-dimensional view of allyship that prioritizes the desires of disadvantaged group members. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |
2024 | Dr. Amburgey explores the interconnections between labor migration, environmental change, and disaster recovery in the Mustang region of Nepal's Himalaya. She argues that anthropology can contribute to policies and research on climate change to include local ecological knowledge. | Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology (PhD) |
2024 | Dr. Moraes examined how to prepare and perform trumpet auditions for professional Canadian orchestras. He interviewed some of the top Canadian trumpet performers and pedagogues on best practices for selected excerpts. His research will assist prospective orchestral musicians with audition preparation. | Doctor of Musical Arts in Orchestral Instrument (DMA) |
2024 | Dr. Hurtado Lozada's four mixed-method studies on party formation failure in Peru demonstrate that social organizations can replace traditional parties, involving disloyal voters and populist politicians. The absence of parties, then, contributes to a gradual but steady weakening of democracy. | Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science (PhD) |
2024 | Why volunteer to help others fix items that are easy to replace? Dr. Kaczmarek explored the motivations and aspirations of volunteers at community repair events, as well as the impact of COVID-19 on their activities. Her research reveals the social and material value of repair through the stories of those involved. | Doctor of Philosophy in Library, Archival and Information Studies (PhD) |
2024 | Dr. Lacelle-Webster studied the work and experience of hope in democratic politics. Drawing on Hannah Arendt and contemporary democratic theory, he proposes a theoretical account of democratic hope that depends on and deepens political practices and spaces, empowering political agents to define possibility as an open, shared, and worldly phenomenon. | Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science (PhD) |