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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. Paradela charts the development of audience research in the Philippines to explain how the imperative for audience discipline, or the imperative to make the people perform the role of audiences as prescribed by the local elites, persisted throughout and the 20th century and intensified during the dictatorial regime of Ferdinand E. Marcos. | Doctor of Philosophy in History (PhD) |
| 2022 | Dr. Pun's research revealed that infants as young as six-months-old expect a larger group to prevail during a conflict. Furthermore, bystanders that witness the conflict are only expected to help members from their own group. These findings suggest that infants may be born with the capacity to make inferences about social status. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |
| 2022 | Dr. Booluck-Miller's work studies how selected female authors use the individual experiences of characters in Francophone literatures to reveal the lived reality of migration trauma. She examines the role of space, psychological dispositions, and sociological implications in African, Caribbean, and Indo-oceanic migrations. | Doctor of Philosophy in French (PhD) |
| 2022 | Dr. Sirari examines the everyday experiences of interracial couples in Vancouver and how they make sense of their relationships. In her interviews, many couples related their personal intimacies to larger discourses of Canada as a multicultural nation. Dr. Sirari's research shows how racial power is reproduced and contested in intimate relations. | Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology (PhD) |
| 2022 | Dr. Sullivan explored the use of vocal works as a pedagogical tool for the bass trombone, and to expand the repertoire for the instrument from other periods of music history. In creating a new edition, he demonstrated that including the original text can inform musical decisions, adding to the body of works available to the bass trombone performer. | Doctor of Musical Arts in Orchestral Instrument (DMA) |
| 2022 | Dr. Lowik investigated the tactics that trans people undertake when accessing reproductive health care spaces that are not equipped to serve their needs. They found that the onus to remedy systematic erasure often falls on trans people and identified the structural forces that prevent this erasure from being addressed systematically. | Doctor of Philosophy in Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice (PhD) |
| 2022 | Dr. Anghelescu examined the prosody of words in Nata, an endangered language of Tanzania. They proposed a novel analysis of tone and vowel harmony in the nominal domain. This research contributes to our understanding of prosodic phonology in both Nata and language more generally. | Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics (PhD) |
| 2022 | Dr. Snelgrove argues that reconciliation is not possible in this society because self-determination remains subordinate to profit. But just as many of us have reasons to be anti-capitalist, we have reasons to desire a treaty relationship and to participate in a politics that aims at the flourishing of humans and more-than-humans. | Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science (PhD) |
| 2022 | Dr. Logan's research centered around Music Performance Anxiety, a highly prevalent condition with severe consequences affecting both professional and student musicians. She investigated whether an intervention could help university music students to manage MPA. Her dissertation demonstrated the urgency to begin implementing intervention programs. | Doctor of Musical Arts in Piano (DMA) |
| 2022 | From 2015 to 2021, Dr. Bhandal led a research project to study social justice perspectives in Canadian nursing and medical education. Specifically, she focused on two areas of theory and practice from social justice studies, decolonization and intersectionality. The findings have been published in various academic and popular venues. | Doctor of Philosophy in Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice (PhD) |