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. Corbett examined the history of punctuality in modern Britain to better understand its development as a value. Tracing the use of the word punctuality, he found that the pressure to be 'on time' is rooted in moral valuations of debt, credit, and trust, which emerged in early eighteenth-century Britain. | Doctor of Philosophy in History (PhD) |
| 2020 | Dr. Villacreses proposes a conceptual approach to understand literary production from a writer's global creative project. He incorporates media studies, the analysis of works of fiction, critical interventions, and public image into the overall literary study of an author. He applied this method in Latin American writers from the late 20th century. | Doctor of Philosophy in Hispanic Studies (PhD) |
| 2020 | As a feminist geographer, Dr. Collard explored the social, political, and legal dimensions of preimplantation genetic tests and the abnormal embryos to which they give rise. She found that the de-selection of these embryos in fertility clinics reflects deeply held assumptions about the bodies and lives we are supposed to want to have and reproduce. | Doctor of Philosophy in Geography (PhD) |
| 2020 | Dr. Osterberg examined police responses to gang violence in BC's lower mainland by conducting qualitative interviews with forty-two police officers and two civilian employees across three jurisdictions. She argues that a productive way forward might include broader community and public health engagement in gang prevention and intervention. | Doctor of Philosophy in Geography (PhD) |
| 2020 | Dr. Gedda examined the earliest versions of the rahitname, a literary genre of Sikh religious ethics. His research situated the production of this genre in relation to the historical and literary context of South Asia in the early eighteenth century. His study contributes to the cultural and social history of pre-modern South Asia. | Doctor of Philosophy in Asian Studies (PhD) |
| 2020 | Dr. Knowles wrote about Philip Roth, placing the irrepressible and controversial novelist more completely in his literary historical contexts. Combining archival research with close textual analysis, Dr. Knowles explored the significance of Roth's entanglement in the discursive dynamics of the Cold War to his ongoing struggle with fictional form. | Doctor of Philosophy in English (PhD) |
| 2020 | Close individuals tend to show synchronized ups and downs of stress hormones such as cortisol. Dr. Pauly examined interconnections in cortisol levels in older couples' daily lives. Her findings help us understand the everyday dynamics that contribute to health being linked in older couples. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |
| 2020 | How does one archive the immaterial, the absent, the inaccessible after times of crisis? How does one make visible the disappeared? Dr. O'Brien investigated the work of Lebanese and Palestinian artists who, after the 1975-1990 Civil War in Lebanon, in which 17,000 people were deemed disappeared, make visible these populations and their histories. | Doctor of Philosophy in Art History (PhD) |
| 2020 | Dr. Choi investigated speech perception in preverbal infants. Her behavioural and neuroimaging research demonstrated that infants integrate information from their articulatory movements during speech perception. These studies advance understandings of how infants may acquire speech, the complex perceptual and motoric skill essential for language. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |
| 2020 | Dr. Wei studied how mortgage market fluctuations in the early 2000's affected long-term labor market outcomes in the US. Her work also investigated the impact of tax incentives on small business growth. These findings have policy implications for labor market recoveries after a financial crisis and the promotion of small businesses. | Doctor of Philosophy in Economics (PhD) |