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 |
|---|---|---|
| 2020 | Dr. Miranda Barrios documented Latin American exiles' use of radio to recreate cultural and political identities and forge solidarity in a west coast Canadian context. Her work sheds light on the efforts of diasporic groups to use bilingual community media to engage diasporic and non-diasporic audiences in social, cultural, and political issues. | Doctor of Philosophy in Hispanic Studies (PhD) |
| 2020 | Dr. Bolen studied the role of the five primary senses (sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste) in contemporary québécois literature. Her research examines the fascinating, albeit complex, relationship between sensory memory and storytelling in novels written by "migrant" writers. | Doctor of Philosophy in French (PhD) |
| 2020 | Dr. Van de Vondervoort examined the contexts in which children positively evaluate helpful versus unhelpful individuals. Her work contributes to our understanding of children's social and moral cognition. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |
| 2020 | While it is tempting to see referendums as the most democratic way of making decisions, others worry that citizens are uninformed or that governments will manipulate the process. Dr. McKay's doctoral research explores how referendums could be redesigned to reinforce, rather than undermine, contemporary democracies. | Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science (PhD) |
| 2020 | Dr. Wildcat's research looks at how colonization has led to the rise of an exclusive practice of sovereignty that prevents cooperation between First Nation governments. As an alternative, the practice of relational sovereignty is explored by looking at how the Maskwacis Education Commission created a shared school system between four First Nations. | Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science (PhD) |
| 2020 | The truth of "magnets attract iron" and "cars stop at red lights" have different weights. The former is more substantive than the latter, which is a convention. Dr. Soltani's research addresses the meaning of, the justification for, and the significance of Henri Poincaré's claim that geometric truths are also conventions. | Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy (PhD) |
| 2020 | Dr. Hollingdale tested the hypothesis that employing more women and people of colour in finance can lead to better financial risk decisions. She found that while firms with more diverse employees in risk-management roles do have better risk outcomes, diversity policies do little to stop the hostility that many minority-employees continue to face. | Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology (PhD) |
| 2020 | Dr. McGuire conducted an ethnography of expensive rare disease drug access disputes in Canada. Through fieldwork with affected families, public drug plans, and pharmaceutical companies, she explored how high drug prices depend on particular framings of suffering that artificially separate rare disease patients from issues of collective concern. | Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology (PhD) |
| 2020 | Dr. Sandlin explored the nature of affective qualities, asking: what makes objects pleasant? His discussion was focused particularly on pleasant smells and pleasantness attributed to objects. He argues that pleasantness cannot be independent of our experience, but rather that pleasantness is a relationship between our experience and the world. | Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy (PhD) |
| 2020 | Dr. Crippen studied the endangered Tlingit (CLING-kit) language of Alaska, BC, & Yukon. He showed that its complex verb has an internal structure that is fundamentally the same as whole sentences in other languages. His work fits Tlingit into the larger theory of human language structure and supports its revitalization within the Tlingit community. | Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics (PhD) |