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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 |
|---|---|---|
| Wylie, Alison | Department of Philosophy | Philosophy; feminist philosophy; philosophy of archaeology; philosophy of science; philosophy of the social and historial sciences; Philosophy, History and Comparative Studies; research ethics (non-medical); science studies |
| Wyly, Elvin | Department of Geography | Social and economic geography; Urban Spaces and Urbanity; Specialized Services (Housing, Transportation); gentrification; housing; the politics of data and quantitative methods; U.S. politics |
| Yan, Miu Chung | School of Social Work | Issues related to settlement and integration of immigrants and refugees, labour market experience of new generation youth from racial minority immigrant families, and community building roles and functions of neighbourhood-level place-based multiservice organizations |
| Yang, Renren | Department of Asian Studies | Comparitive Literature; Modern Chinese Popular Culture; 20th-and 21st-century Chinese culture; Modern Chinese literature; Modern Chinese cinema; Literary and media analysis; Literary celebrity and social media; Time-travel imagination in East Asia; Surveillance narrative and cinema; Communication in the age of digital culture |
| Yi, Christina | Department of Asian Studies | Asian history; Cultural Studies; genre; Japanese colonial repatriates; Language politics; Linguistic nationalism; Modern/Contemporary Japanese literature; National identity; Postcoloniality; Resident Koreans; “Repatriation literature” (hikiage bungaku); “returned” Nikkei |
| Yin, Shoufu | Department of History | East Asian, Eurasian, and global histories from about the eleventh to the seventeenth centuries, Political, social, and intellectual cultures |
| Yodanis, Carrie | Department of Sociology | Family, Marriage, Statistics |
| Yoo, Philip | Department of Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies | Jewish studies; Religion and religious studies; Hebrew Bible; Second Temple Judaism |
| Yoon, Florence | Department of Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies | heralds and the representation of the absent; anonymity and naming, particularly in Greek Tragedy; props and silent characters in Greek drama |
| Young, Mary-Lynn | School of Journalism, Writing, and Media | Sociology of the media, gender, media economics, representations, online news, media and crime, Internet |
| Yu, Henry | Department of History | Asian migration to Canada, Chinese Canadian, Asian Canadian, Chinese in British Columbia, multiculturalism, racism, Asian American history, sports and race, Chinatown, Head Tax, United States, Global Vancouver, Trans-Pacific migration, American intellectual history, Asian Canadian and Asian American history, race and immigration, social science and social theory in US and Europe |
| Zaiontz, Keren | Department of Theatre & Film | Performing arts; Performance studies; experimental performance practices; performance and the city; the cultural politics of festivals and mega-events; art-activism and social movements |
| Zeitlin, Michael | Department of English Language and Literatures | American literature, twentieth century and contemporary, Faulkner, Psychoanalysis, Vietnam, the Gulf, Iraq, Afghanistan |
| Zeweri, Helena | Department of Anthropology | Anthropology; Mobility; migration; Critical refugee studies; settler colonialism; Anthropology of care, policy, social movements, empire |
| Zhang, Gaoheng | Department of French, Hispanic & Italian Studies | Intercultural and Ethnic Relationships; Cultural Exchanges; Migrations, Populations, Cultural Exchanges; Media and Society; Media Ethics; Media and Democratization; Migration Studies; Mobility Studies; Postcolonial Studies; Gender and Masculinity Studies; Race Theory; Film and Media Studies; Rhetoric and Communication Studies; Cultural Theory; Italian-Chinese relations; Italy's global networks; Modern and contemporary Italian literature and culture |
| Zhu, Jian | Department of Linguistics | Computational Linguistics, Natural Language Processing, Speech Sciences |
| Ziethen, Antje | Department of French, Hispanic & Italian Studies | African Literatures; Francophone Literatures and Cultures; Speculative fiction; (Urban) Space; Postcolonial Studies; Diaspora Studies; Transnationalism; Gender Studies; Modernity |
| Zuo, Mila | Department of Theatre & Film | Cinema & Media studies; film studies; Contemporary Asian and transnational cinemas; Film philosophy; Acting and performance studies; Star studies; Digital and new media; Critical theories of gender, sexuality, and race and ethnicity |
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 |
|---|---|---|
| 2021 | Dr. Lou's work challenges the traditional view that simile is a literal metaphor. Instead, he argues that similes formulate figurative comparisons that metaphors cannot. His study contributes to cognitive linguistics, rhetoric, and multimodal studies by illustrating how the human mind is attuned to thinking and communicating in similative ways. | Doctor of Philosophy in English (PhD) |
| 2021 | Dr. Glazier's research examined how socially anxious individuals remember positive events. Her studies found a recall bias in social anxiety disorder and examined the role of post-event processing. This research can inform future attempts to help socially anxious individuals benefit from positive experiences. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |
| 2021 | Dr. Ulehla's research concerns living songs from Slová¡cko, a rural region at the border of the Czech and Slovak Republics. Building upon familial musical lineages marked by rupture and continuity, she explores the life of song and its participation in an ethics of relation, enacted through emergent networks of human and more-than-human others. | Doctor of Philosophy in Music, Emphasis Ethnomusicology (PhD) |
| 2021 | Dr. Wu studied the representation of time in modern Chinese literature. Her research showed how Chinese writers perceive the self at odds with its time, which becomes the driving force of literary creativity. | Doctor of Philosophy in Asian Studies (PhD) |
| 2021 | Dr. Pierce investigated how sediment moves through river channels using analytical and numerical modeling. He developed new methodologies to predict the movements of individual particles and overall sediment transport rates. This work informs numerous engineering, ecological restoration, and contaminant mitigation projects involving river channels. | Doctor of Philosophy in Geography (PhD) |
| 2021 | Inuit interactions with their homelands create unique ways of knowing that guide how people interact with the land and living beings. Dr. Greene examined how Inuit living along the western Hudson Bay coast have formed and passed on land-based knowledge and how people draw on lived experiences and expertise to contribute to governance in Nunavut. | Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology (PhD) |
| 2021 | Dr. Koostachin examines how positionality shapes the creative process of Indigenous documentarians, revealing the impacts on core concepts, themes, and forms within their practice of documentary. Her research methodology is rooted in a paradigm that privileges InNiNeWak (Cree) ways of being. | Doctor of Philosophy in Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice (PhD) |
| 2021 | Dr. Kang developed a novel econometric framework for modeling persistent and low-frequency stochastic cycles - a crucial feature of macroeconomic and financial data. The framework is used to study the cyclical properties of macroeconomic and financial time series. The presence of stochastic cycles has important implications on macroeconomic models | Doctor of Philosophy in Economics (PhD) |
| 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) |