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. Gaudet explored how health awareness discourse under capitalism shapes understandings of health and what it means to be healthy. Her findings show that while health awareness has been long analyzed in terms of individual public health campaigns, the rhetoric of "health awareness" is often taken up by commercial marketing campaigns. | Doctor of Philosophy in English (PhD) |
| 2020 | Dr. Van der Berg studied the cognitive mechanisms that underlie our appreciative engagement with things we value. He showed how existing theories of appreciation, in their narrow focus on our evaluative judgements and experiences of pleasure, overlook the importance of how our attention is modulated as episodes of appreciation unfold. | Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy (PhD) |
| 2020 | Dr. Fry compared language analyses derived by humans and machines. He demonstrated that unsupervised machine learning is able to generate language analyses that are comparable to those generated by humans. His research adds to the growing dialogue that machine learning has become a useful tool for theoretical linguists. | Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics (PhD) |
| 2020 | Dr. Haddon investigated the impact of social class on views towards inequality. He found that the working classes are concerned with inequality in both unequal and more equal societies, but as levels of inequality increase, the views of the various classes begin to converge. This may have policy implications as income inequality continues to grow. | Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology (PhD) |
| 2020 | Dr. Sengupta focused on retrieving the suppressed accounts of the histories of early modern kalamkari makers from the Coromandel region, India, and recognized their integrity. His study identified the cruciality of bringing the active presence of contemporary artisans into this investigation to reconstruct the agency of historical kalamkari makers. | Doctor of Philosophy in Art History (PhD) |
| 2019 | Dr. Sanchez explored the continuing impact of Samuel Beckett's literary and dramatic texts on contemporary art practices, focusing specifically on the works of three artists: Stan Douglas, Paul Chan and Tania Bruguera. She identified the "Beckett Effect" as politically and artistically significant in contemporary art. | Doctor of Philosophy in Art History (PhD) |
| 2019 | Dr. Pow examined the social support process. She found that what people think is at stake during stressful situations might play a role in shaping the support process. She also found that the type of support mobilized is related to fluctuations in pain intensity for those with rheumatoid arthritis. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |
| 2019 | Dr. Held studied political alienation in advanced industrialized democracies. His study shows the limitations of traditional institutional fixes and highlights the role of both procedural and substantive information for civic engagement. These findings may inform government strategies to increase youth voter turnout and political accountability. | Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science (PhD) |
| 2019 | Dr. Keough examined how experience with speech-related airflow affects whether we use it to discriminate between sounds. She showed that while adults can use airflow cues even in novel situations, the ability likely arises through developmental experience. Her work helps us understand how interactions with the world shape our perception of speech. | Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics (PhD) |
| 2019 | Dr. Heim studied the role of intonation in Canadian English for the negotiation of shared beliefs. He discovered that the shape of the sentence melody correlates with the interpretation of the speaker's confidence and their response expectation. This study sheds a new light on how speakers encode their attitudes and intentions in conversation. | Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics (PhD) |