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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 |
|---|---|---|
| Nelson, Laura | Department of Sociology | Social movements, culture, gender, and organizations and institutions, Processes around the formation of collective identities, Social movement strategy in feminist and environmental movements, Continuities between cycles of activism and the role of place in shaping social movement activity, Intersectionality in U.S. women’s movements, Coverage of social movements in news media over time, Ways in which history is recorded and remembered, Gender inequality in startups and entrepreneurship |
| Nicholson, Cecily | School of Creative Writing | Languages and literature; Poetry |
| Nobiss, Jac | School of Social Work | |
| Norenzayan, Ara | Department of Psychology | social psychology; cultural psychology; evolutionary psychology; religion; culture; human cooperation; human universals; thinking across cultures, Psychology of religious thought and behavior, religious diversity, cooperation and conflict, issues of cultural variability and universality in human behavior, and cultural evolution, broadly conceived |
| Norris, Samuel | Vancouver School of Economics | Economics and business administration; Education; Crime; labor economics |
| Nunn, Nathan | Vancouver School of Economics | Economics; Political economy; Economic History; economic development; cultural economics; international trade |
| O'Brien, Heather | School of Information | All other social sciences, n.e.c.; user engagement; user experience; community engagement; information seeking and retrieval; information access; cognitive processes related to information searching and evaluation; health technologies |
| O'Connor, Deborah | School of Social Work | family support to frail or mentally impaired seniors; formal support services, Dementia, the interface between living with dementia, family care, and the use of formal support services |
| Oberoi, Harjot Singh | Department of Asian Studies | South asia, how classical empires shaped the British Raj in India, critical theory, the formation of private libraries, law and society, transnational cultures, and complex systems |
| Odic, Darko | Department of Psychology | Cognitive development |
| Ohlin, Alix | School of Creative Writing | Fiction; Screenwriting; Environmental writing |
| Ongchoco, Joan | Department of Psychology | perception and mental life; Cognitive Science |
| Orbaugh, Sharalyn | Department of Asian Studies | modern Japanese culture (literature, film, manga, animation, kamishibai); East Asian women’s issues; anti-racist pegagogy, Japanese narrative and visual culture |
| Orell, Julia | Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory | History of Chinese Art; Landscape painting of the Song and Yuan dynasties; Construction of place, site, region, and empire in painting and other visual media; Art and the production of knowledge; Cultural and historical geography; History of cartography |
| Ostwald, Kai | School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, Department of Political Science | comparative politics; ethnic politics, public policy, and the politics of development |
| Pailer, Gaby | Department of Central, Eastern & Northern European Studies | German literature, gender and literature, drama and theatre, enlightment, classicism and romanticism |
| Palombo, Daniela | Department of Psychology | Psychology and cognitive sciences; Autobiographical memories; Cognitive Science; Imagination; Future Thinking |
| Paltin, Judith | Department of English Language and Literatures | English language; Literary or Artistic Work Analysis; Artistic and Literary Theories; Artistic and Literary Movements, Schools and Styles; Cultural Theory; Gender and Sexuality Studies; Literature and Mind; Literature and Music; Modernist Studies |
| Pareles, Mo | Department of English Language and Literatures | mutual construction of species; sexual and ethnic difference in medieval English religious literature |
| Paris, Leslie | Department of History | History of American childhood, History of American summer camps, Modern American social and cultural history, childhood and youth, gender and sexuality, popular culture |
| Park, Kyung Ae | School of Public Policy and Global Affairs | Korean politics (North and South Korea); U.S.-Korean relations; Korean unification, North and South Korean Politics, US-Korea Relations, Gender and Development |
| Partridge, Stephen | Department of English Language and Literatures | Middle Ages |
| Patterson, Christopher | Institute for Gender, Race, Sex and Social Justice | Transpacific discourses of literature, games, and films |
| Peck, Alexandra | Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory | Social and cultural anthropology; Other studies related to history and archaeology; Art history and theory; Native tribes and First Nations in the Pacific Northwest; historical Northwest Coast art; Salish (Coastal and Interior) art; Anthropology/anthroplogical methods; Material culture, archaeology, museums |
| Peck, Jamie | Department of Geography | Social and economic geography; Socio-Economic Conditions; Economic geography |
Pages
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)
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Statues in early modern English drama (ENGL - MA)
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 |
|---|---|---|
| 2022 | Dr. Ma conducted cross-field research in labor, public, and education economics. He found that student grants provided to low-income family students lead to higher earnings after graduation. The findings assist us in understanding the long-term labor market impact of various forms of student financial aids. | Doctor of Philosophy in Economics (PhD) |
| 2022 | Utilizing literature from philosophy, cognitive science, and dance studies, Dr. Heckman argued that spectators' bodily responses to dance are crucial for understanding and appreciating dance. | Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy (PhD) |
| 2022 | Dr. Johnson explored the experiences of adolescents who had completed treatment for cancer. Posttreatment is an invisible phase in the cancer trajectory yet holds significant implications for youth. This research highlights posttreatment as a dynamic period of time and compels clinical attention to it within adolescents' cancer survivorship care. | Doctor of Philosophy in Social Work (PhD) |
| 2022 | Dr. Wang researched the causes and legacies of a state-sponsored massacre of Muslims in southwestern China. She investigated how Islam and Maoism had shaped interactions between Muslim villagers and communist officials from 1949 to 2019. Her work provides insights into why religious conflicts frequently emerge under communist rule in modern China. | Doctor of Philosophy in History (PhD) |
| 2022 | Dr. Adkins studied the impact of social pressures on interracial relationships. She discovered that individuals restructure their identity using methods to develop and maintain racialized trust with their partners. Her contributions include introducing a new process called racial frame convergence, which advances the areas of identity and trust. | Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology (PhD) |
| 2022 | Dr. Shin explored how popular media in South Korea portrayed the pursuit of wealth as a masculine quality during the 1960s and the early 1970s. Unlike conventional portrayals of South Korean capitalism as state-led development, Dr. Shin showed how popular media encouraged ordinary South Koreans to embrace profit-seeking and capital accumulation. | Doctor of Philosophy in History (PhD) |
| 2022 | Dr. St. Rose Yeo studied the possibilities generated by creative practices to subvert temporal dominance as formulated in Western modernity. Her work contributes to ongoing discourses that suggest creative practices play a critical role in transforming systems of harm in our global present. | Doctor of Philosophy in Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice (PhD) |
| 2022 | Dr. Lo studied how Mandarin-English bilinguals use vowel-initial pitch to distinguish certain speech sounds. He found that these bilinguals use pitch as a cue, but to different degrees, when pronouncing and listening to words in Mandarin versus English. This research informs both the flexibility of and limitations in how bilinguals process speech. | Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics (PhD) |
| 2022 | Dr. Brodyn examines how queerness impacts the way people imagine and create families. Three inter-related studies illuminate the ways queer people employ individual and relational strengths in order to transform the family context into a site of potential healing from societal stigmatization and trauma. | Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology (PhD) |
| 2022 | Dr. Giffen analysed a transnational archive of literary responses to the HIV/AIDS epidemic and showed how the turn to sacred address constitutes a life-saving practice of freedom in the face of death. Her research proposes new methodologies for reading the politics of illness, literature and globalization in sacred and secular worlds. | Doctor of Philosophy in English (PhD) |