Ife Adebara
Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics (PhD)
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The Faculty of Arts at UBC brings together the best of quantitative research, humanistic inquiry, and artistic expression to advance a better world. Graduate students in the Faculty of Arts create and disseminate knowledge in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Creative and Performing Arts through teaching, research, professional practice, artistic production, and performance.
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.
Research Centres
Research Facilities
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.
Research Highlights
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.
Schools / Departments
School
Department
Graduate Degree Programs
Research Supervisors in Faculty
or browse the list of faculty members in various academic units. You may click each unit to view faculty members appointed in that unit. View the full faculty member directory for more search and filter options.
| Name | Academic Unit(s) | Research Interests |
|---|---|---|
| Girard, Jonathan | School of Music | conducting, orchestra, opera, new music, conducting pedagogy, orchestral repertoire, symphonic music, orchestral music, orchestration, Berlioz, Stravinsky |
| Glassheim, Eagle | Department of History | European history (except British, classical Greek and Roman); History of Central and Eastern Europe; Environmental History |
| Glassman, James Francis | Department of Geography | Development Geography, Third World Urbanization, Economic Geography, Political Economy, Political Geography, Southeast Asia, Pacific Rim |
| Goetz, Friedrich | Department of Psychology | Psychology, social and behavorial aspects; Geographical psychology; Causes and consequences of regional personality differences; Mobility and migration; Wanderlust; Courage; Entrepreneurship; Personality development; open science |
| Gordillo, Gaston | Department of Anthropology | Space and violence, affect, ruins and ruination, critical theory and continental philosophy, object-oriented ontologies, resistance to agribusiness, Latin America, Argentina, the Gran Chaco |
| Gramling, David | Department of Central, Eastern & Northern European Studies | Humanities and the arts; Social sciences; Medical, health and life sciences; multilingualism / monolingualism; Literary Theory; lgbtq queer studies; labour migration; applied linguistics; health communication; translation; Turkish literature; German studies |
| Green, David | Vancouver School of Economics | Antibiotic Resistance, Infectious Disease, Epidemiology, Determinants of the wage and employment structure bridging between macro labour and micro labour identification issues |
| Griffin, Michael | Department of Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies, Department of Philosophy | Greek philosophy, Ancient philosophy, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Proclus, Neoplatonism, Ancient logic |
| Gu, Xiong | Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory | Fine Art. Transcultural identity and hybridity. Through the critical angle of visual art, my work encompasses other elements such as sociology, geography, economics, politics, literature; and finally, the dynamics of globalisation, local culture and individual identity shifts. These shifts do not merely constitute a simple amalgamation of two original subjects, but instead, seek to create an entirely new space., Installation, painting, drawing, photography, contemporary art theory |
| Guerin, Ayasha | Department of English Language and Literatures | |
| Gusterson, Hugh Phillimore | Department of Anthropology, School of Public Policy and Global Affairs | |
| Guy-Bray, Stephen | Department of English Language and Literatures | Renaissance poetry |
| Hall, David Geoffrey | Department of Psychology | Lexical and conceptual development, semantic development, language acquisition |
| Hall, Kathleen | Department of Linguistics | Linguistics; Phonology; Phonetics; Laboratory Phonology |
| Hallensleben, Markus | Department of Central, Eastern & Northern European Studies | Transcultural Studies; Artistic and Literary Theories; Literary or Artistic Works Analysis; Migrations, Populations, Cultural Exchanges; German Language Cultures and Literatures; Transnational Literatures; Visual Arts and Literature; European Studies; Literature and Sciences; Literature and Migration; Narratives of Belonging |
| Hamel, Keith | School of Music | Music composition; Composition; Interactive Computer Music |
| Hamlin, Kiley | Department of Psychology | Psychology and cognitive sciences; Cognitive development; Moral Judgement and Duty or Obligation Morals; Infant / Child Development; Foundations of Religious, Mystical, Mythical and Moral Thoughts; Infant moral cognition; infant social cognition |
| Hamm, Corey | School of Music | Piano and Chamber music |
| Hammerly, Christopher | Department of Linguistics | Syntax & Morphology; Psycholinguistics; Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe) |
| Handy, Todd | Department of Psychology | aging and cognition, aging and exercise, cognitive neuroscience, attention, migraine, fMRI, Cognitive neuroscience, neuroimaging, attention and its impairment in clinical populations, mind wandering, and real-world human behaviour |
| Hanser, Jessica | Department of History | Early Modern Britain; Economic History; Great Divergence; Drugs in History; China and the West; Qing China; Slavery; British Empire; Microhistory; Global History |
| Hanser, Amy | Department of Sociology | Work and employment; gender; consumption/consumerism; contemporary Chinese society, Culture and markets, inequality, gender, consumption, service work, China |
| Hansson, Gunnar | Department of Linguistics | Linguistic structures (including grammar, phonology, lexicon and semantics); Cognitive sciences; theoretical phonology; morphology-phonology interface; phonological typology; historical linguistics (language change); locality relations; Icelandic |
| Harris, Mark | Institute for Gender, Race, Sex and Social Justice | Indigenous rights; land claims; the stolen generations; intellectual property; criminal justice issues; Cultural Heritage; postcolonial legal theory |
| Harrison, Kathryn | Department of Political Science | Canadian politics, environmental politics, environmental policy, climate change, global warming, climate change policy, Canadian public policy |
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Graduate Student Stories
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Recent Publications
This is an incomplete sample of recent publications in chronological order by UBC faculty members with a primary appointment in the Faculty of Arts.
Recent Thesis Submissions
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The Arthur of the March of Wales (ENGL - PHD)
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Pidgin poetics : language culture in modern China (ASIA - PHD)
Doctoral Citations
A doctoral citation summarizes the nature of the independent research, provides a high-level overview of the study, states the significance of the work and says who will benefit from the findings in clear, non-specialized language, so that members of a lay audience will understand it.
| Year | Citation | Program |
|---|---|---|
| 2023 | Dr. Diabo studied the politics of listening in Mohawk and other First Peoples' literatures. Taking the Haudenosaunee Great Law of Peace as a blueprint, their research theorizes what it means to listen politically in both First Peoples and settler-colonial contexts. | Doctor of Philosophy in English (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Gemaliel Vimala's research using food prices in India showed that when people use physical cash for transactions, prices are usually set in round digits and they change less often. In an online setting, such bunching reduces and prices change more frequently. This brings out the policy implication of increased flexibility of prices in a cashless world. | Doctor of Philosophy in Economics (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Lok studied whether people avoid talking to strangers because they underestimate other people's willingness to connect. Her work led to the development of an actionable framework that outlines the conditions that need to be met before strangers decide to engage with each other. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Castaneda studied narratives and aesthetics in 21st century Colombian films that challenged the longstanding invisibility of Afro-Colombian subjects. Her analysis helps in increasing awareness of anti-racist trends and the struggle to democratize the film representation regime in which the White/Mestizo aesthetics remains dominant. | Doctor of Philosophy in Hispanic Studies (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Fabris' dissertation focused on the Piikani Nation's attempts to challenge the construction of the Oldman River Dam in the 1980s/1990s. His research findings draw attention to the continued limits of reconciling Indigenous law with Canadian law without addressing the implications of Indigenous jurisdiction. | Doctor of Philosophy in Geography (PhD) |
| 2023 | In languages, meaningful words and signs consist of meaningless units, or phonemes. Dr. Tkachman shows how phonemes could emerge from embodied motivations in language evolution. Her research brings together linguistics and cognitive science and demonstrates profound consequences of embodiment in communication and cognition. | Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Zimmermann reviewed how modern German-language literature challenges views of refugees as problems that threaten European liberal nation-states. Texts can illustrate that neither European citizens nor refugees are permanent outsiders or insiders to a place. The findings are relevant for literary discourses on the categorization of migrants. | Doctor of Philosophy in Germanic Studies (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Cheng studied the social construction of personal identity. | Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Maslany investigated how affective valence influences visual attention scope. She examined the theory that positive valence broadens attention scope, and negative valence narrows it. In 5 experiments, she found no evidence for the theory. Thus, she proposed limits under which the influence of valence on visual attention scope does not occur. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Cooke studied the practice of oboists giving the tuning-A in historical and contemporary orchestras. She found that oboists see tuning as not only a practical tool, but as a musical solo which can inspire other musical works like John Corigliano's Concerto. This research illuminates the history and beauty of an often-overlooked tradition. | Doctor of Musical Arts in Orchestral Instrument (DMA) |