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 |
|---|---|---|
| 2018 | Dr. Luedee studied the environmental history of the Porcupine Caribou Herd. He demonstrated how the demarcation of political borders in the western Arctic and the creation of boundary concepts in the biophysical sciences, transformed human understandings of and relationships with this group of migratory animals during the twentieth century. | Doctor of Philosophy in Geography (PhD) |
| 2018 | Dr. Nowak examined the space of the Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw during the German occupation of Poland as experienced by those forced to inhabit it. In her thesis, she introduced a concept of violence that allows a description of space itself as a form of violence. Her work contributes to Holocaust Studies as well as current research on space and violence. | Doctor of Philosophy in Germanic Studies (PhD) |
| 2018 | Dr. Fraser studied electricity use by households in British Columbia, as well as the choice of air versus ocean shipping in international trade. His work helps us find ways to improve the efficient use of energy by understanding how households respond to financial incentives, and through opportunities to ship products by sea instead of by air. | Doctor of Philosophy in Economics (PhD) |
| 2018 | Dr. Parent studied performance art in Vienna in the 1960s. She considered it to be symptomatic of a collective trauma, rooted in the body, and tied to cultural repression and capitalist exploitation. She argues that feminist actionist Valie Export's work exposed women as the disavowed worker body, which exacerbated fragmented social ties. | Doctor of Philosophy in Art History (PhD) |
| 2018 | Dr. Kobayashi studied musical composition, theory, and technology. In the themes of embodied virtuality and musical affordance, he developed interactive performance systems and generative programs. His thesis piece Forms, for string quartet and computer, represents the dynamic integrity of phenomena that form the universe harmoniously. | Doctor of Musical Arts in Composition (DMA) |
| 2018 | Dr. Henderson's dissertation is a critical exploration of aging and old age in contemporary, professional Canadian theatre. It investigates recent English-language, Western-based plays, asking how they offer alternatives to stereotypical, negative ways of depicting aging and old age either through aspects of their dramaturgy and/or production. | Doctor of Philosophy in Theatre (PhD) |
| 2018 | Dr. Barrick examined the politics of United States immigration enforcement practices towards Central American asylum seekers, including the denial of common asylum claims and family separation through detention. This research offers insights into how public policy could better support this population's well-being and access to asylum. | Doctor of Philosophy in Geography (PhD) |
| 2018 | Dr. Stecula examined the relationship between the news media and political polarization on important topics, like climate change, in the United States. He found that the news is increasingly politicized, and that propels polarization. This has implications for how important topics should be covered by the media to avoid political conflict. | Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science (PhD) |
| 2018 | Dr. Bell studied a missionary exhibition of First Nations art at the Vatican in 1925. Through an analysis of beadwork, statuary, and children's games, Bell presents a new historiography of the mobility of Indigenous visual culture drawing on Indigenous theories. This research illuminates the ongoing confluences of archives and Indigenous histories in Rome. | Doctor of Philosophy in Art History (PhD) |
| 2018 | A longstanding question in the study of language development is how infants understand their first object words. Dr. Campbell found evidence that infants as young as six months have a capacity to learn words with individual scope and words with categorical scope. Her findings reveal a previously undocumented richness in early word comprehension. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |