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 |
|---|---|---|
| 2013 | Dr. Isenberg's work explains how we can have real beliefs and emotions about fictional characters and situations when we know that they do not exist and did not occur. She developed a framework for characterizing these responses that will provide guidance for future work in the semantics of fiction and the philosophy of film. | Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy (PhD) |
| 2013 | Dr. L'Abbé studied ways in which Ronald Johnson, an American avant-garde poet, used botanical metaphors to represent the human mind and language. She argues that Johnson's poetry revives the horticultural metaphors in words such as cultivation and culture and shows how plant metaphors apply to the study of cognition, perception and poetic vision. | Doctor of Philosophy in English (PhD) |
| 2013 | Dr. Abbott's research focused on contemporary policy issues in education and housing economics. Findings improve our understanding of the complex roles of financial barriers in common household decisions, such as whether or not to attend college or buy a house. Future academic and public policy work in these areas will benefit from these findings. | Doctor of Philosophy in Economics (PhD) |
| 2013 | Dr. Horton explored, through oral history, how and why diverse Indigenous people in North America joined the Baha'i religion during the second half of the twentieth century. Her study argues that becoming Baha'i was also a process of becoming Indigenous. In so doing, it offers fresh perspective on Indigenous identity, conversion, and community. | Doctor of Philosophy in History (PhD) |
| 2013 | Dr. Calvert developed a framework for determining when and how political rhetoric threatens the democratic quality of political judgments. She identified new practices and functions by which democratic institutions might promote good political judgments, despite the fact that the ways people use language in politics are almost always strategic | Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science (PhD) |
| 2013 | Dr. Murray completed his studies in the field of Psychology. He showed that the perceived threat of infectious disease causes higher levels of social and political conservatism, and causes lower levels of scientific innovation. These findings add to our understanding of what causes psychological variation between people and across cultures. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |
| 2013 | Dr. Watson studied letter-colour synaesthesia, an unusual trait where each letter is associated with a particular colour. He showed that many of these associations are acquired in childhood, and that they can be useful for learning. These findings will help us understand the development of such unusual traits, but also of more typical associations. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |
| 2013 | Dr. Torres studied the assimilation problems of immigrants to Canada. He focused on the origin of human capital and how it related to the immigrant-native wage gap. He discovered that much of the wage gap is due to the inability of immigrants to transfer their human capital. This information will be useful in future strategic planning for immigrants. | Doctor of Philosophy in Economics (PhD) |
| 2013 | Dr. Uban demonstrated neuro-biological alterations in central dopamine-stress interactions following prenatal alcohol exposure. These novel neurobiological findings help explain the increased prevalence of substance use disorders observed among individuals with a fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |
| 2013 | Dr. Hwang studied ethno-racial variations in two facets of cohesion in Canada: trust in others and trust in political institutions. She explored why trust among ethno-racial communities may differ from established cultural groups. The amount of trust can differ substantially, depending on which group is asked the question and the type of trust. | Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology (PhD) |