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 |
|---|---|---|
| 2014 | Dr. Michalak studied the way sound is used in the literature and culture of the twentieth century. He argues that writing of that period was affected by images and noises of the modern day media systems. Attention to sound requires new ways of making sense of literature, which benefit scholars and readers interested in media. | Doctor of Philosophy in English (PhD) |
| 2014 | Dr. Buffam developed a method of comparative analysis that tracks the social and legal effects of racism across divergent geopolitical contexts. He used this method to document how racial discourses of criminality shaped the legal regulation of Chicago's African American populations and Vancouver's South Asian populations. | Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology (PhD) |
| 2014 | Dr. Persson studied Old English literature in the Department of English at UBC. His work demonstrates that Biblical commentaries on Job and Ecclesiastes are relevant contexts for interpreting Old English wisdom poetry. It benefits scholars of English and Theology, as well as those interested in how wisdom is handed down within cultures. | Doctor of Philosophy in English (PhD) |
| 2014 | Dr. Wu examined how the Chinese Communist Party's national leaders imposed discipline over local members in eastern Shandong from 1928 to 1948. He found that they did this through systematic organizational control, ideological education and class struggle. This research is valuable in understanding the party's rise to power and its legacy on China. | Doctor of Philosophy in History (PhD) |
| 2014 | Dr. Polanco studied Filipino migrant workers at Canadian Tim Horton`s restaurants. She traced the cultural and structural dimensions of work and labour market regulation under migrant worker schemes. One implication is Canada's introduction of a new guest worker scheme that is both ambiguous and risky with regard to transitioning to permanent status. | Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology (PhD) |
| 2014 | Dr. Belcher authored an historical and theoretical analysis of US and Canadian counter-insurgency warfare in Afghanistan. He showed how forms of knowledge embedded within counter-insurgency doctrine enabled particular modes of violence to take place in Afghanistan, such as empowering corrupt police forces, razing villages and displacing populations. | Doctor of Philosophy in Geography (PhD) |
| 2014 | Dr. Fraser studied collective and personal love in Latin American poetry of the Cold War. She found that, contrary to the stereotype of the "passionate Latin American poet/lover/revolutionary", the coexistence of these two loves was tense and required creative strategies of resolution. Her work challenges assumptions about the region's literature. | Doctor of Philosophy in Hispanic Studies (PhD) |
| 2014 | Dr. Jaillant studied the Modern Library, a cheap series of reprints created in New York in 1917. This research helps us question the boundaries of the modernist literary canon, since the Modern Library published works by modernist writers such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf but also detective fiction and novels that we now see as "middlebrow." | Doctor of Philosophy in English (PhD) |
| 2014 | Dr. Lovins examined the reforms of King Chongjo in 18th century Korea. He argues the King substantially expanded royal power during his reign while his institutional reforms failed to carry this success into future reigns. His research reveals Chongjo's reign as a challenge to the "continuous decline" model of early modern Korean history. | Doctor of Philosophy in Asian Studies (PhD) |
| 2014 | Dr. Tse examined how Cantonese-speaking Protestants grounded their theologies by democratically participating in the civil societies of Vancouver, San Francisco, and Hong Kong at the end of the 20th century and early 21st century. This study helps the public to understand how Chinese Christians are participating in politics. | Doctor of Philosophy in Geography (PhD) |