Photo: Martin Dee
Applicants to Master’s and Doctoral degrees are not affected by the recently announced cap on study permits. Review more details
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.
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. Gutierrez Cubillos showed that intergenerational mobility of earnings in Chile is non-linear, with very high mobility for the bottom 80 percent and very high persistence for the top. He also developed methodologies to include corporate retained earnings in the measurement of income inequality and applied them to Canada and Chile. | Doctor of Philosophy in Economics (PhD) |
| 2021 | Dr. Brace proposed and developed novel methods for evaluating and quantifying systematic bias in psychometric questionnaires. These methods can be used ensure the validity of between-group and cross-cultural comparisons of psychometric survey scores. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |
| 2021 | Dr. Banta examined the geographies of returning Overseas Filipino Workers and the Philippines' migrant reintegration policy, which she argues is a strategy aimed to transform migrant workers into self-reliant entrepreneurs and investors. She illuminated the need for critical interventions in return migrant policymaking and grassroots organizing. | Doctor of Philosophy in Geography (PhD) |
| 2021 | Dr. Kozik examined the relationship between exercise and cognition. His research found that performance on laboratory measures of cognition was predicted by the degree to which individuals were cognitively engaged during exercise. These results suggest that actively using one's mind during exercise may offer greater benefits than exercise alone. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |
| 2021 | Dr. Dang studied how cultural factors influence sexuality among young Chinese and Euro-Caucasian women and men. His work showed that cultural and ethnic differences primarily impact sexual inhibition among men, and sexual excitation among women. His research will inform treatments for sexual difficulties in ethnically diverse populations. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |
| 2020 | Dr. Oluic dissertation focuses on the creation of an imagined European community in the nineteenth century as posited by four thinkers and essayists from Spain and Italy. His research elaborates a link between nineteenth century Europeanism and the present, exploring the relations that define national and supranational sovereignty. | Doctor of Philosophy in Hispanic Studies (PhD) |
| 2020 | Dr. Murch investigated the psychology of slot machine gambling. He found behavioural and physiological markers of a highly-focused attentional state called immersion in play. These findings clarify the role of slot machine design in the development of gambling problems, providing new guidance for treatment professionals and gambling regulators. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |
| 2020 | Dr. Wells offers a corrective to the common historiography of the Korean language, which treats vernacularity as natural and literary vernacularization as foreordained. He shows that turn-of-the-20th c. shifts in Korean language practice were not inevitable, but driven by Korean nationalists, Western missionaries and Japanese imperial officials. | Doctor of Philosophy in Asian Studies (PhD) |
| 2020 | Dr. Manson examined how Romani people living in France are being affected by state efforts to regulate their movement and place of residence. His analysis shows that larger debates about the place of the Roma in Europe are increasingly being played out spatially through localized battles over housing, mobility, and other basic rights. | Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology (PhD) |
| 2020 | Dr. Peiris explored a drumming tradition in Sri Lanka, looking at how people have thought of it before, during, and after the encounter with European colonial rule. He used musical change as a lens to examine changing social contexts in South Asia, contributing to broader discussions about the reach and impact of ideas that cross national borders. | Doctor of Philosophy in Music, Emphasis Ethnomusicology (PhD) |