Eric Simons
Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology (PhD)
Archaeological Contributions to Canadian Indian Residential School Reconciliation
Canadian Immigration Updates
Applicants to master’s and doctoral degrees are not affected by the recently announced cap on study permits. Review more details
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Ramana, M. V. | School of Public Policy and Global Affairs | Public administration; Public policy; Public security policy; arms control; Energy transitions; degrowth; nuclear disarmament; nuclear energy; nuclear policy; political economy of energy; risk of nuclear accidents |
| Ramankutty, Navin | School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, Institute for Resources, Environment & Sustainability | Natural environment sciences; Public administration; Public policy; Public security policy; Agriculture; Climate Changes and Impacts; Climate impacts; Environment and Society; Global food security; Land use change; Sustainable agriculture |
| Rankin, Catharine | Department of Psychology | Effects of experience early in development on adult behaviour and the nervous system, adult learning and memory |
| Rea, Christopher | Department of Asian Studies | Chinese literatures; Asian history; Chinese literature; Cinema; Print culture; translation; Humor |
| Rehavi, M. | Vancouver School of Economics | Economics; Law; Health Care Organization; Public Finances and Taxation; Algorithms; applied econometrics; criminal law; decision support (algorithms); discrimination; maternal health |
| Riano-Alcala, Pilar | Institute for Gender, Race, Sex and Social Justice | Lived experience of violence, Historical Memory and the politics of commemoration and witnessing, Forced migration (internal displacement and refuge), Critical and participatory methodologies, Community organizing, everyday resistance and social repair, Public art |
| Richardson, Lindsey | Department of Sociology | Sociology of health and illness, substance use, HIV/AIDS, urban health, sociology of work and economic life, health disparities |
| Richardson, Alan Walter | Department of Philosophy | History of philosophy of science in early twentieth century |
| Rieger, Caroline | Department of Central, Eastern & Northern European Studies | Laughter in interaction, education for global citizenship, translation, language assessment, learning of a third language in a second language environment |
| Rights, Jason | Department of Psychology | R-squared measures and methods for multilevel models; unappreciated consequences of conflating level-specific effects in analysis of multilevel data; delineating relationships between multilevel models and other commonly used models; advancing model selection and comparison methods for latent variable models |
| Rizzotti, Patrick | Department of Theatre & Film | Performing arts; design; Design and Planning of Space; Theatrical Productions; Virtual Reality; Augmented reality; design for new works; devised work; narrative visual experience; production design; site specific experiences; theatre design |
| Robertson, Leslie | Department of Anthropology | Indigenous and settler historiographies, colonial regimes of difference, spectacle and narrative, and political histories of resistance in settler nations, afterlife of historical colonialism, forms of power and representation in the context of urban marginalization (drug use, sex work, health, and violence) |
| Robinson, Dylan | School of Music | Indigenous Arts |
| Roosa, John | Department of History | Historical studies; Social Organization and Political Systems; Human Rights and Liberties, Collective Rights; Foreign Affairs; History of Indonesia |
| Rosenberg, Jordy | Department of English Language and Literatures | |
| Rosenblum, Daisy | Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies, Department of Anthropology | multi-modal documentation and description of indigenous languages of North America, with an emphasis on methods, partnerships, and products that contribute to community-based language revitalization |
| Rouse, Robert | Department of English Language and Literatures | Medieval Literatures; Environment, space and place |
| Rowley, Susan | Department of Anthropology, Department of Anthropology | Anthropology, n.e.c.; repatriation; museums; material culture; Cultural Heritage; arctic archaeology; heritage management |
| Roy, Marina | Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory | Intersection between materials, history, language, and ideology |
| Rullmann, Hotze | Department of Linguistics | Linguistics; Semantics |
| Rusk, Bruce | Department of Asian Studies | Asian history; Literary or Artistic Work Analysis; Social Determinants of Arts and Letters; Arts and Cultural Traditions; Exegesis and Sacred Text Critics; Lexicography and Dictionaries; Authentication Studies; Confucianism; Early Modern China; material culture |
| Safieddine, Hicham | Department of History | Political economy and intellectual history (19th and 20th centuries), Political Economy of the Middle East, Modern Arab and Islamic Thought, Economic Thought and Theory, Global Financial Order, Currency Regimes, Private Banking, and Colonial Finance |
| Saggio, Raffaele | Vancouver School of Economics | Labour Economics; Alternate Work Arrangements; applied econometrics; Matched employer-employee datasets |
| Salamon, Anne | Department of French, Hispanic & Italian Studies | Literatures in French outside Quebec; French language; Historical linguistics, diachronics, and dialectology; Romance Philology; Medieval French Litterature; Manuscript studies; History of the French language; Critical editing of medieval texts |
| Salgirli, Saygin | Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory | architecture of fourteenth-century Bursa, the first Ottoman capital |
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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)
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. Lachance analyzed how campaign information influences voters in Canada, U.S. and Germany. Her research shows that policy matters for voters, even when affect plays a significant role in their decision. In sum, her work shows that campaigns give voters the information they need to choose the alternative that will best represent their interests. | Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science (PhD) |
| 2022 | Dr. Chewinski examined rural people's participation in environmental politics following the 2014 Mount Polley mining disaster. He focused on how meaning-making processes, emotions, and cultural contexts produced inequalities in public consultations and incited community mobilization in response to mounting environmental risks. | Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology (PhD) |
| 2022 | Dr. Inniss researches complex forms of provocative humour in recent avant-garde, decolonial, anti-capitalist, and feminist poetry. Focusing on three poets who write from different social locations, he argues that the textual-political value of such aggressively humorous poetics lies in its ability to destabilize dominant notions of social identity. | Doctor of Philosophy in English (PhD) |
| 2022 | Dr. Ritchie's research provided new archaeological evidence and perspectives for better understanding how the ancestors of the Sts'ailes - Coast Salish lived and related to other people and the land around them, how this changed over time, and how it continues to influence contemporary territoriality and identity. | Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology (PhD) |
| 2022 | Dr. Cannon conducted interdisciplinary research examining relationships between people and coral reef health. This included analyses of coral communities in the central Pacific, a meta-analysis of a common proxy for coral reef health, and an examination of the ways that coral reef conservationists talk about local threats facing coral reefs. | Doctor of Philosophy in Geography (PhD) |
| 2022 | Dr. Cole examined working adults' sense of self-efficacy when learning using web search engines. They constructed a scale of self-efficacy and applied mixed methods to identify factors that contribute to User Experience professionals' sense of confidence while learning using search. | Doctor of Philosophy in Library, Archival and Information Studies (PhD) |
| 2022 | Dr. Fung studied the memory mechanisms underlying social anxiety. He found that physical characteristics of people, and self-attributes are feared stimuli, and negative evaluation is a feared outcome for socially anxious people. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |
| 2022 | Dr. Riano Rodriguez studied the determinants of State Capacity in developing countries and the impact of conflict in the long run. He showed how Political Competition, Bureaucratic Nepotism, and institutional reforms can affect the state's administrative capacity and how specific conflicts can have persistent effects on economic development. | Doctor of Philosophy in Economics (PhD) |
| 2022 | Dr. Paradela charts the development of audience research in the Philippines to explain how the imperative for audience discipline, or the imperative to make the people perform the role of audiences as prescribed by the local elites, persisted throughout and the 20th century and intensified during the dictatorial regime of Ferdinand E. Marcos. | Doctor of Philosophy in History (PhD) |
| 2022 | Dr. Pun's research revealed that infants as young as six-months-old expect a larger group to prevail during a conflict. Furthermore, bystanders that witness the conflict are only expected to help members from their own group. These findings suggest that infants may be born with the capacity to make inferences about social status. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |