Photo: Martin Dee
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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.
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 |
|---|---|---|
| 2022 | Dr. Dwyer found that cash transfers improved housing stability and financial security for the homeless, and he quantified the well-being benefits of cash transfers across the global socioeconomic spectrum. His findings demonstrate that cash assistance may be an effective way to help those who are homeless or living in poverty. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |
| 2022 | Dr. Qiu studied how suicidal individuals construe death, and how different aspects of death construal relate to suicidal ideation and attempts. This research enhances understanding of the progression from suicidal thoughts to acts. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |
| 2022 | Dr. Ma conducted cross-field research in labor, public, and education economics. He found that student grants provided to low-income family students lead to higher earnings after graduation. The findings assist us in understanding the long-term labor market impact of various forms of student financial aids. | Doctor of Philosophy in Economics (PhD) |
| 2022 | Utilizing literature from philosophy, cognitive science, and dance studies, Dr. Heckman argued that spectators' bodily responses to dance are crucial for understanding and appreciating dance. | Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy (PhD) |
| 2022 | Dr. Johnson explored the experiences of adolescents who had completed treatment for cancer. Posttreatment is an invisible phase in the cancer trajectory yet holds significant implications for youth. This research highlights posttreatment as a dynamic period of time and compels clinical attention to it within adolescents' cancer survivorship care. | Doctor of Philosophy in Social Work (PhD) |
| 2022 | Dr. Wang researched the causes and legacies of a state-sponsored massacre of Muslims in southwestern China. She investigated how Islam and Maoism had shaped interactions between Muslim villagers and communist officials from 1949 to 2019. Her work provides insights into why religious conflicts frequently emerge under communist rule in modern China. | Doctor of Philosophy in History (PhD) |
| 2022 | Dr. Adkins studied the impact of social pressures on interracial relationships. She discovered that individuals restructure their identity using methods to develop and maintain racialized trust with their partners. Her contributions include introducing a new process called racial frame convergence, which advances the areas of identity and trust. | Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology (PhD) |
| 2022 | Dr. Shin explored how popular media in South Korea portrayed the pursuit of wealth as a masculine quality during the 1960s and the early 1970s. Unlike conventional portrayals of South Korean capitalism as state-led development, Dr. Shin showed how popular media encouraged ordinary South Koreans to embrace profit-seeking and capital accumulation. | Doctor of Philosophy in History (PhD) |
| 2022 | Dr. St. Rose Yeo studied the possibilities generated by creative practices to subvert temporal dominance as formulated in Western modernity. Her work contributes to ongoing discourses that suggest creative practices play a critical role in transforming systems of harm in our global present. | Doctor of Philosophy in Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice (PhD) |
| 2022 | Dr. Lo studied how Mandarin-English bilinguals use vowel-initial pitch to distinguish certain speech sounds. He found that these bilinguals use pitch as a cue, but to different degrees, when pronouncing and listening to words in Mandarin versus English. This research informs both the flexibility of and limitations in how bilinguals process speech. | Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics (PhD) |