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 |
|---|---|---|
| 2016 | Dr. Cairns studied forced migrant craftspeople from the Sudetenland and their resettlement in Bavaria after 1945. Her work explores how governments used the Sudetenlanders' initiatives to rebrand West German national identity and market consumer goods. She demonstrates migrant agency and the power of small scale industries to improve communities. | Doctor of Philosophy in History (PhD) |
| 2016 | Dr. Ferguson challenged the common understanding of the term transgender, revealing its imprecise and exclusionary nature and, using feminist methodologies and autoethnography, theorized a new intertextual and interdisciplinary approach to gender studies beyond woman/female and man/male. | Doctor of Philosophy in Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice (PhD) |
| 2016 | Dr. Jiang investigated positive self-illusions in children with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder. Findings showed that these children do not appear to overestimate their social abilities. This study increases insight into the self-perceptions of children with ADHD, and informs clinical approaches to furthering child and family well-being. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |
| 2016 | When someone is unsure about the truth of a statement, they may have a partial belief; for example the belief that the probability of rain tomorrow is three out of ten. Dr. Lukits defended the claim that rational agents update their partial beliefs by ensuring that they respect evidence without gaining more information from it than necessary. | Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy (PhD) |
| 2016 | Dr. Narcisse examined the outstanding land issue in British Columbia from the indigenous perspective. She found that while the circumstances of colonialism were prevalent, the oral history about the inherent indigenous land ownership has remained consistent over several generations. | Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology (PhD) |
| 2016 | Dr. Li studied how international trade affects human capital accumulation and consequently alters regional comparative advantage and industry specialization. Using the data from China, she found that export expansion between 1990-2005 led to a regional divergence in educational attainment, and such amplified differences across regions reinforce the initial industry specialization pattern. | Doctor of Philosophy in Economics (PhD) |
| 2016 | Dr. Laursen studied how people historically experience and make knowledge about elusive phenomena. Focusing on twentieth-century British and American poltergeist cases, he found that research best advanced through active collaborations of those who experienced the phenomenon. His work contributes new directions to studying the boundaries of knowledge. | Doctor of Philosophy in History (PhD) |
| 2016 | Dr. Fenig studied the provision of public goods in our economic system. He designed experiments that investigated the role of rewards in facilitating coordination of contributors. He identified both altruistic and competitive participants. His study advances our understanding of human behaviour in an economic context and his results will help inform economic policy and practice. | Doctor of Philosophy in Economics (PhD) |
| 2016 | Dr. McAndrews investigated whether Americans draw sophisticated inferences about the legislative performance of their elected officials, and why Canadian MPs bother to debate bills when the government ultimately controls the decision-making. His research sheds new light on the competence of citizens and the motivations of those who represent them. | Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science (PhD) |
| 2016 | Dr. Winston traced the evolution of the field of transitional justice. She showed how states decide what counts as "appropriate behavior" when addressing a history of domestic human rights abuses. Her work contributes to the conceptual understanding of international norms and their diffusion across the international system. | Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science (PhD) |