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 |
|---|---|---|
| 2015 | Dr. Fast completed her doctoral studies in Art History and Theory. She focussed on art and artists in India during the late colonial period, from the 1920s to the 1940s. Her research showed how professional artists used print and printmaking media, to carve out new spaces of economic and social opportunity for themselves during this period. | Doctor of Philosophy in Art History (PhD) |
| 2015 | People in conversation tend to adopt each other's speech patterns. Dr. Abel explored whether working on a difficult task would affect that tendency, and found that partners building a more difficult Lego construction showed less convergence than those building an easier one. This research gives insight into the mechanisms behind speech convergence. | Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics (PhD) |
| 2015 | Dr. Leung studied how East Asian artists in Canada and Britain started theatre companies to create opportunities for Asian Canadian and British East Asian cultural expression. Comparing Toronto's fu-GEN theatre and London's Yellow Earth, she juxtaposes two ethno-national sites not often paired together, revealing remarkable, shared vocabularies. | Doctor of Philosophy in Theatre (PhD) |
| 2015 | Dr. Voth's research helps to explain the political divisions between Métis and First Nations peoples living in Manitoba's Red River Valley. Dr. Voth traced the roots of Métis-First Nations political tensions, and developed a framework for building a de-colonial political movement that includes both First Nations peoples and the Métis. | Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science (PhD) |
| 2015 | Dr. Tito examined the impact of international trade on the way in which firms select their workforce. She documented that exporting firms tend to select workers who are better qualified for the job, compared to similar non-exporting companies. This suggests that opening up to trade reduces the revenue losses due to mismatches between workers and firms. | Doctor of Philosophy in Economics (PhD) |
| 2015 | Dr. McGovern studied separatism in Québec, Scotland and Ireland. She found that separatists often participate peacefully in political institutions and co-operate with governments. This research shows how democracy can work, even when there are fundamental divisions within a country, and that separatism does not inevitably lead to violent conflict. | Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science (PhD) |
| 2015 | Dr. Lee studied the neural basis of stress and emotional behavior in adolescence. She found that neural and behavioural responses to stress exposure differ across the life span. Her research enhances our understanding of how stress and cannabis exposure affects the developing brain, behaviour, and the development of stress-related disease. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |
| 2015 | Dr. Paris argues that the early modern theatre and early modern church were both concerned with keeping the attention of their audiences. One of the ways that dramatic interest in the tragedies of Marlowe and Shakespeare was generated was by staging acts that can be read as ambiguous, interrupted, failed or parodic confessions, prayers, and sermons. | Doctor of Philosophy in English (PhD) |
| 2015 | Dr. Willard examined how basic cognitive functions and cultural environments come together to create complex, supernatural belief systems. She found that some people are more likely than others to see the world as supernatural. Still, cultural learning explained the most of the variance in who adopted or abandoned a specific religious belief system. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |
| 2015 | Dr. Muthukrishna developed theories to explain the evolution of the human brain and human social networks. He used mathematical and computational modeling techniques to construct theories, then tested them using psychological experiments. His findings suggest that human "smarts" are acquired, not hardwired, and the key lies in our social networks. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |