Photo: Martin Dee
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Cookson, Tara | School of Public Policy and Global Affairs | Public policy; Development; Social protection; Care work; Gender equality |
| Cooper, Elisabeth | Department of Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies | Archaeology of greater Mesopotamia |
| Copeland, Brian | Vancouver School of Economics | International trade, environmental economics, interaction between globalization, the environment, and the sustainability of renewable resources |
| Corrigall-Brown, Catherine | Department of Sociology | Sociology; social movements; identity; political sociology; social psychology |
| Coulthard, Lisa | Department of Theatre & Film | film theory and violence; film sound and violence, contemporary American and European cinemas, continental philosophy and Lacanian theory |
| Coulthard, Glen | Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies, Department of Political Science | First Nations politics – national; political theory |
| Creighton, Millie | Department of Anthropology | Japan, Japanese descent communities (Nikkei or Nikkeijin), Korea, Inter-Asian Relations, Identity, Consumerism, Popular and Mass Culture, Gender, Minorities, Work and Leisure |
| Crowston, Clare | Department of History | history of early modern France, history of labor, women and gender, material culture, economic exchange, and fashion |
| Cutler, Frederick | Department of Political Science | Social movements and democracy; public opinion; Political Methodology; Canadian Politics; Elections; Electoral Systems; Federalism; Academic Publishing Systems |
| Dadugblor, Stephen | School of Journalism, Writing, and Media | English language; Rhetoric; Digital media/social media; democratic deliberation; decoloniality; writing studies; African Studies |
| Dalziel, Pamela | Department of English Language and Literatures | Victorian-literature, Victorian-culture, visual-representation, illustration, gender-studies, religion, interdisciplinary-studies, textual-criticism, scholarly-editing, Thomas-Hardy, Charles-Dickens, George-Eliot |
| Dancygier, Barbara | Department of English Language and Literatures | Linguistics, grammar |
| Daniels, Megan | Department of Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies | Classical religion; Archaeology of Greece and the broader eastern Mediterranean; Late Bronze Age to Hellenistic Period; Ancient religion, sanctuaries, votive objects; Cross-cultural interaction; Ancient economies and trade; Divine kingship; Digital/data science approaches to the ancient world, particularly ancient religion; Migration and mobility across Eurasia; Phoenician culture; Ceramic analysis |
| Dauvergne, Peter | Department of Political Science | Social sciences; international relations; global environmental politics; sustainability governance; global South; Developing countries; transnational corporations; technology; consumption; Plastic Pollution; social movements; environmentalism; activism; deforestation |
| Davis, Ryan | School of Music | Strings |
| Davis, Henry Thomas | Department of Linguistics | First Nations languages |
| Dawson, Samantha | Department of Psychology | Psychology and cognitive sciences; Interventions for sexual dysfunction; Sexual function and dysfunction in individuals and couples |
| De Angelis, Franco | Department of Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies | Ancient Greek world history, environment, urbanism, developmnet of societies, colonization, economics, ancient literature |
| de Villiers, Jessica | Department of English Language and Literatures | Linguistics |
| Dechaine, Rose-Marie | Department of Linguistics | Native American languages; Algonquian language family, Cree, Blackfoot, Ojibwe; French / English bilingualism policy; formal linguistics; generative grammar (Chomsky); West African languages (Niger-Congo, Yoruba, Igbo, Edo); Nigerian languages; literacy vs. oralcy; language planning re: French, Indigenous languages, Speech/gesture coordination, syntactic interface relations |
| Deer, Glenn | Department of English Language and Literatures | discourse studies, the rhetoric of power in narrative fiction, and postmodernism and Canadian Literature |
| DeLongis, Anita | Department of Psychology | Psychology and cognitive sciences; social determinants of health; chronic illness; coping; couples; families; health; Health Psychology; marriage; social support; stress |
| Dempsey, Jessica | Department of Geography | wrestle with the theoretical and historical-geographical complexities of environmental politics as it shapes and is shaped by the entanglement of state, economy, science, and culture |
| Devereux, Michael | Vancouver School of Economics | Economics, Macro and Monetary Economics Economic Policy, Monetary and Fiscal Policy, Deficits, Exchange Rates, Capital Flows, Financial Crises, International, monetary |
| Dick, Alexander | Department of English Language and Literatures | Literary or Artistic Work Analysis; Philosophy, History and Comparative Studies; Artistic and Literary Theories; Arts, Literature and Subjectivity; British Romanticism; Scottish Enlightenment; Literature and Economics; Literature and the Environment; Literature and Science; Scottish Literature |
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 |
|---|---|---|
| 2023 | Dr. Salles advanced the documentation of Pirahã, a vulnerable language spoken in the Amazon, and contributed to destigmatizing a non-standard dialect of Brazilian Portuguese. Her work also provided a fresh take on a long-standing puzzle in the field of linguistics, by proposing that nouns can be licensed by categories other than articles. | Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics (PhD) |
| 2023 | There are many unsolvable debates in the world. How do we use the Internet to make sense of them? Dr. Novin researched how biases on the Internet influenced student inquiries, search strategies, and decisions. He documented the cognitive methods participants used to counter biases. This will help educators with teaching critical thinking skills. | Doctor of Philosophy in Library, Archival and Information Studies (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Ji studies the in-process tensions surrounding boundaries that emerge from and respond to the interplay of difference and sameness, with a particular focus on the transformation of ethnic minority identities in post-socialist China. | Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Yan examined the interactions between the Chinese and Spaniards in the Philippines through the creation of a Spanish manuscript, the Boxer Codex (1590s). Her study illuminates the convergence of sixteenth-century book cultures from China and Europe, offering fresh perspectives on the Sino-Hispanic relations in the Spanish colony. | Doctor of Philosophy in History (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Ono explored how mothers facing violence navigate child protection and family law systems. Her research uncovered how practices are ideologically-driven by the legal principle best interests of the child, causing more harm to women and children. This contributes to social work by highlighting how texts can be tools of resistance not complicity. | Doctor of Philosophy in Social Work (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Matavelli examined the role of lack of communication in perpetuating misperceptions about social norms, especifically in the context of masculinity norms. She also investigated the role of norms change, proxied by an election outcome, on violence against women. She then showed that psychedelic intake led people to leave the formal labour market. | Doctor of Philosophy in Economics (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Wang studied the value of Chinese art song to Western vocal pedagogy. He introduced a collection of Chinese art song teaching repertoire and created a new Mandarin IPA system to solve the Mandarin pronunciation difficulty in singing. His study will enable Western educators to incorporate Chinese art songs more effectively into their curricula. | Doctor of Musical Arts in Orchestral Instrument (DMA) |
| 2023 | Dr. Leischner studied what happens to Indigenous voices when they are recorded and held in museums and archives. Guided by members of the Nuxalk Nation, she found that the collection and stewardship of these recordings overlaps with logics of resource extraction. Her findings emphasize the importance of Indigenous law and anti-extractive research. | Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology (PhD) |
| 2023 | Dr. Vega Acuna studied, using a field experiment, how leadership roles can improve the academic performance and social integration of low-income students at a top university in Peru. He also shows how low-income students, during the Covid-19 online classes period, faced more difficulties to score higher grades than other students. | Doctor of Philosophy in Economics (PhD) |
| 2023 | Nikolai Medtner was a Russian composer whose large contribution to the art song genre has gone mostly unnoticed. Dr. Stanyer looks at how Medtner set complex Russian and German poetry to music, and how he communicated text and meaning through music. This research will be beneficial to future performers of these wonderful art songs to aid in interpretation. | Doctor of Musical Arts in Piano (DMA) |
