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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.
| Name | Academic Unit(s) | Research Interests |
|---|---|---|
| Van Handel, Leigh | School of Music | |
| Veenstra, Gerry | Department of Sociology | Sociology and social studies of health, health systems and health care; Health equity; Sociology, n.e.c.; social determinants of health; Socioeconomic status and health; racial health inequalities; Bourdieusian field theory, lifestyle practices and health; culture and class; Quantitative Methods; Sociology of soccer |
| Vellutini, Claudio | School of Music | Music; Critical Musicology; Cultural and reception history of nineteenth-century Italian opera; Early 19th century music (opera); Habsburg cultural policies; Historiography; Italian opera in the Habsburg Empire; Performance and staging practices; Vienna opera (first half of 19th century) |
| Vessey, Mark | Department of English Language and Literatures | classical/Christian literary culture in late antiquity; European Renaissance; church fathers (i.e. Augustine, Jerome); Erasmus; bible and book history, Biblical and classical traditions, very early Latin middle ages, intellectual history, 16th century English literature, history of books |
| Victoriano, Ramon Antonio | Department of French, Hispanic & Italian Studies | Caribbean literatures; Latin American literatures; Contemporary literatures; Hispanic Caribbean Literatures and Cultures; Latin American Contemporary Novel and Short Story; Caribbean Literatures |
| Vigna, John | Novels, stories and news; Fiction, Literary Non-Fiction, Creative Writing | |
| Wagner, Katherine | Vancouver School of Economics | Economics; Environmental and Energy Economics; Public Finance |
| Walsh, Shannon | Department of Theatre & Film | Media arts; Critical identity, ethnic and race studies; Social and cultural anthropology; South Africa; Afropessimism & Critical Race Studies; Documentary; Film Production; Indigenous studies; Environmental justice; Affect Theory |
| Wang, Jessica | Department of Geography | US history, 19th and 20th centuries, history of science and medicine, political and intellectual history, social and urban history, US international history |
| Ward, Lawrence | Department of Psychology | Neurosciences, biological and chemical aspects; Neurosciences, medical and physiological and health aspects; Psychology and cognitive sciences; brain plasticity and cultural learning; cognition; cognitive neuroscience of consciousness, perception, memory, spontaneous thought; computational neuroscience of neural oscillations, brain regional networks; effects of noise in the brain; electrophysiology; Neuronal Systems; stochastic processes |
| Weaver, Michael | Department of Political Science | Politics of violence; Ethnic politics and media; Causes and consequences of ethnic violence; Lynching; Legitimacy of state and non-state violence |
| Webster, Crystal | Department of History | African American history, History of early America, African American women & children, Criminalization & incarceration |
| Werker, Janet | Department of Psychology | Neurosciences, biological and chemical aspects; Psychology and cognitive sciences; Bilingualism and Multilingualism; Critical Periods; Language Acquisition; Language Acquisition and Development; Language and Cognitive Processes; Multisensory Processing; Plasticity; Psycholinguistics; Psychology - Biological Aspects; speech perception; Speech and Language Development Disorders |
| Weston, Darlene | Department of Anthropology | Anthropology; Archeological Data Analysis; Bioarchaeology; Biological Anthropology; Osteoarchaeology; Paleodemography; Paleopathology |
| Whiting, Brian | Anthropology, n.e.c.; Geophysics, n.e.c.; Archaeology; Geophysics; GIS; Indigenous studies; Geoscience | |
| Whitney, Valerie | School of Music | Music; French Horn |
| Wilkes, Rima | Department of Sociology | protest, media and First Nations, media and racism, immigration, Collective Action by Indigenous Nations, Media and social movements, Public Opinion, Immigration, Trust |
| Williams, Jennifer | Department of Geography | Population ecology; Evolutionary ecology; Ecological mathematical and statistical models; Population Ecology; Ecological and evolutionary processes |
| Wilson, Eric | School of Music | Cello |
| Wilson, Tina | School of Social Work | Social work; social work and environment; history and philosophy of social work; critical social theories; generational standpoints; Social justice; social work rhetoric |
| Winstanley, Catharine | Department of Psychology | Neurosciences, biological and chemical aspects; Neurosciences, medical and physiological and health aspects; Psychology and cognitive sciences; Addiction; Behavioural neuroscience; decision making; Gambling disorder; Impulsivity; Mental Health and Society; Neuronal Systems; Neuropharmacology; Computational neuroscience; Traumatic Brain Injury |
| Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey | Department of Central, Eastern & Northern European Studies | German theories of media and cultural techniques, Complexity, biological evolution and animal studies, Secret societies and conspiracy theories, Science Fiction (special focus on Alternate history) |
| Wong, Danielle | Department of English Language and Literatures | Asian American studies; Asian migration studies; Historical and contemporary relationships between race, Empire, and new technologies; Asian North American new media productions and performances |
| Wood, Jasper | School of Music | Violin, chamber music |
| Woody, Sheila | Department of Psychology | Psychology and cognitive sciences; Mental Health and Society; Anxiety; cognition; Community Health / Public Health; Specific Social Services (Clientele); Hoarding |
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 |
|---|---|---|
| 2021 | Dr. Leesing's thesis examined how high-rises were portrayed in diverse media in Germany from 1945 to 2020. Her findings showed how the high-rise changed the definition of 'home' while also becoming a tool for cultural forgetting and institutional surveillance. This work stresses the importance of architecture and media in a time of cultural shifts. | Doctor of Philosophy in Germanic Studies (PhD) |
| 2021 | Dr. Michalowski found that fluctuating emotions are linked with both concurrent and longitudinal health in older couples. Her findings illuminate everyday emotional dynamics that shape interconnected aging trajectories in spouses. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |
| 2021 | Dr. Hopkins researched historical and structural interactions between politics and classical music. He proposed three foundational ways for classical pianists to integrate political speech and action into their studies and careers, and also commissioned two new piano compositions that each address current political issues. | Doctor of Musical Arts in Piano (DMA) |
| 2021 | Dr. Child examined how modern US military interrogation systems work. Much more than an interpersonal encounter in a dark room, this research showed that US intelligence agencies frequently model interrogation similar to a vast bureaucratic machine that efficiently processes as many sources and as much information as possible. | Doctor of Philosophy in Geography (PhD) |
| 2021 | Dr. Jansen's research analyzes the absence of women's childbirth as a subject for medieval Christian art. Identifying the visual and textual mechanisms utilized to manipulate gender in the figuring of the Virgin and Christ demonstrates that the visual language of female procreation was displaced onto the male body of the crucified Christ. | Doctor of Philosophy in Art History (PhD) |
| 2021 | Dr. Baer investigated the development of our sensitivity to confidence, the subjective signal that tells us when we are right. She found that children's confidence combines multiple sources of information to create broadly-usable assessments of truth. Her work informs our understanding of the core cognitive properties of the mind and of learning. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |
| 2021 | Dr. Dwyer examined the lasting impact of the 3rd century BCE playwright Apollodorus of Carystus, whose work survives only in fragments and Latin adaptations. His dissertation reshapes our understanding of comic theatre from Hellenistic Greece and offers crucial insight into the afterlife of Apollodorus in Roman drama. | Doctor of Philosophy in Classics (PhD) |
| 2021 | Dr. Enkhbaatar proposed a method that estimates household preference and hidden stock market participation costs from micro-panel data, and used it to analyze how the stock market collapse impacted household consumption. This research is useful for policymakers measuring the impact of financial crises and monetary policy on household consumption. | Doctor of Philosophy in Economics (PhD) |
| 2021 | Dr. Wiebe studied whether China's economic growth can be explained by meritocratic promotion, where leaders with higher GDP growth are rewarded with promotion. Focusing on prefecture leaders, he found no evidence for meritocracy, and found that the evidence from the literature is not robust. This research improves our understanding of modern China. | Doctor of Philosophy in Economics (PhD) |
| 2021 | Dr. Dodd studied American poets theater. Using archival research and theory, her work argues that poets theater has been used as a tool for both building and preserving community through reperformance. These findings broaden our understanding of the intersection of poetry and performance and lends new insight into several important poetic movements. | Doctor of Philosophy in English (PhD) |