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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 |
|---|---|---|
| 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 |
|---|---|---|
| 2023 | Dr. Sadaka wrote The Book of Ice, a musical composition for flute solo and chamber orchestra, which responds to The White Book, a novel written by the South Korean writer Han Kang. This piece blends pitch-set theoretical techniques and a spectral attitude to orchestration, and it develops original ways of combining music and text. | Doctor of Musical Arts in Composition (DMA) |
| 2023 | Dr. Klaiber studied the minor uplifting events that occur frequently in daily life. He showed how the lifespan developmental context and personality differences are linked to how many of these positive events people experience and how they respond to them. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Wadden examined the bioethical implications of using artificial intelligence and machine learning in healthcare decision-making, specifically focusing on advanced diagnostic systems. He demonstrated how these systems entail new obligations for clinicians toward their patients and how they may impact a patient's ability to consent to treatment. | Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Glass studied stories of human encounters with the divine in ancient Jewish, Christian, and pagan literature, often called epiphanies. This comparative research illustrated shared beliefs in how and why the gods intervened in human life, and contributes to our understanding of intercultural relations in the ancient Mediterranean. | Doctor of Philosophy in Religious Studies (PhD) |
| 2023 | American Indians have the highest rates of early school leaving but are often left out of data. Working with the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community, Dr. Keegahn examines this omission through Indigenous education and data sovereignty. Her research reveals the ongoing erasure of American Indians and ways the Swinomish have sought to address this. | Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Stensrud studied the function of hypocrisy accusations in the U.S. slavery debates, tracing this rhetoric's influence on nineteenth-century writers. He demonstrates that authors incorporated anti-slavery invective in their work to translate political economic analysis into a moral vocabulary capable of mobilizing the public against slavery. | Doctor of Philosophy in English (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Mackenzie's dissertation discusses some of the earliest visualizations of plants seen through a microscope. She explored the relationship between images and knowledge-making in the seventeenth century, at a moment where new ways of seeing were emerging in response to novel approaches for understanding and documenting the natural world. | Doctor of Philosophy in Art History (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Lacy Boersma examined how the language of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, especially the words used to articulate doctrines of the Church of England, contributed to England's modern identity. She shows that it is not only ideas which define a nation. Terminology, the origins and associations of terms used to express those ideas, also matter. | Doctor of Philosophy in English (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Minniti investigated the distribution and use of Egyptian and Egyptian-inspired objects, also known as Aegyptiaca, in Sicily during the Archaic Period (ca. 776-480 BCE). Her analysis provides a better understanding of how the objects were adopted into local customs, and the reasons why their owners chose to use them. | Doctor of Philosophy in Classics (PhD) |
| 2022 | Dr. Sandhra studied museums as spaces of belonging through the experience of three Asian Canadian migrant communities in BC - Sikhs, Chinese and Japanese. Her research and findings centred racialized voices only as a means to demonstrate the power of margins as the site of solidarity and belonging in public history discourse. | Doctor of Philosophy in History (PhD) |