Photo: Martin Dee
Review details about the recently announced changes to study and work permits that apply to master’s and doctoral degree students. Read more
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 |
|---|---|---|
| 2012 | Dr. Bendix identified the factors that encourage majority-party leaders in the U.S. House of Representatives to seize control of bill development and, as a result, prevent the minority party from participating in deliberations. He also examined the policy consequences of this one-party control and demonstrated that it tends to produce substantively problematic legislation. | Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science (PhD) |
| 2012 | Dr. Redlich investigates how Yoko Tawada's German literary texts can be read as politically charged cultural criticisms. In particular this research reveals how the unstable production and perception of 'race' is a central literary theme in nearly all of Tawada's literature. | Doctor of Philosophy in Germanic Studies (PhD) |
| 2012 | Dr. Hecht examined the evolution and roles of inclusive institutions and democratic status, or hierarchies based on democratic governance, in international organizations. Her work showed how these factors affect cooperation or discord among states, by analyzing democratic norm development and policy implementation in the UN and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. | Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science (PhD) |
| 2012 | Dr. Ivanova studied 11th century Japanese women writers, and how their work was adapted in the 16th to 19th centuries. She found the images of those women were transformed as political contexts, readerships, and socio-cultural conditions changed. She demonstrated the role of genre and gender in the canonization of Japanese women's literature. | Doctor of Philosophy in Asian Studies (PhD) |
| 2012 | Dr. Meola evaluated the contributions of German Jews within the German press over the period 1815-1848. Through actions and words, German Jews transformed local newspapers into public spaces, where they destabilized the status quo and strove for a society where they would be equal to German Christians. | Doctor of Philosophy in History (PhD) |
| 2012 | Dr. Morin used new techniques to analyze the mineralogy of artifacts from across British Columbia, especially those made of jade. He used this information to identify pre-contact patterns of First Nations trading relationships, and the social role of these tools. | Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology (PhD) |
| 2012 | Dr. Aknin studied how everyday spending choices can influence a spender's happiness and well-being. Her research demonstrated that spending money on others leads to higher levels of happiness than spending money on oneself, as well as when these emotional benefits are most likely to occur. Her research helps illuminate that the complex relationship between wealth and well-being. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |
| 2012 | Dr. Woodman's thesis shows citizenship in China is a local rather than national relationship that means participation and entitlements are connected to membership in the specific place where a person belongs. Her research proposes new theoretical avenues for the study of citizenship focusing on subnational locations of politics. | Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology (PhD) |
| 2012 | Dr. St.Onge showed how brain regions within a specific neural circuit in the rat help us make decisions among different options that vary in the amount and probability of reward. This research helps explain how interactions between different brain systems shape preferences for larger, risky or smaller, more conservative rewards. | Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology (PhD) |
| 2012 | Dr. Beausoleil examined the possibilities and challenges of democratic engagement through the performative arts. This work has provided a general theory for these practices, isolated key democratic resources within them, and articulated the contribution such practices offer to democratic politics more broadly. | Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science (PhD) |