The Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies is now accepting applications for the Undergraduate Research Award. This award provides undergraduate students support to engage in research and creation activities over the summer months. The deadline for this award for a research project over the summer of 2016 is March 15th at 4pm.
scene from 22 Sins to Salvation
In 2013, Dean Krawchuk (Interdisciplinary Performance major) used the award to create a theatre piece based on the life of the Russian monk, Grigori Rasputin. “My purpose in creating 22 Sins to Salvation was to give myself the opportunity to devise my own show enabling me to enter my fourth year of University with a more refined set of skills that I can apply to my graduation work.” says Dean.
Jessica Bonney
With this award from FCCS in 2014, Jessica Bonney (Creative Writing major) worked with Briar Craig in the print studio learning to use the letter press, and creating a chapbook called Genesis. The final book is a collection of 12 poems that explore change and the human experience, using fish as a metaphor for the complexity and fecundity of life, abundance, and coming of age. The project was an exercise in creating a book that was cohesive in its visual elements as well as the text within it.
Brandon Taylor
Brandon Taylor (English major) was a recipient in 2014. His research project involved a critical investigation of how contemporary American commercial television programming creates empathetic routes toward sociopaths and what this relationship implies. He immersed himself in the relevant literature of Television Studies (Fiske, Mittel, Kellner, Feuer, etc.) and on Breaking Bad, exploring how it shifts the white male psychopath paradigm (Martin’s Difficult Men, Sepinwall’s The Revolution was Televised).
Meghan Hunter
Megan Hunter (Creative Writing major) worked on an interactive performance in 2015. Meghan created a script and invited and worked with performers (vocalists or soundmakers in the community) as well as current and graduated BFA students in Interdisciplinary Performance. The performance was called Murmurations and it was presented at the Brent’s Grist Mill Heritage Park. The performance was one of four artist presentations at the site in the summer of 2015 organized under the umbrella of a community public art initiative called Bee Central.
Trystan Carter
Trystan Carter (Creative Writing/English major) proposed to go stay at the Best Western in Osoyoos in 2015, where the movie Gunslinger was shot, and write “The Best Western.” The final novel is a funny, endearing, self-reflexive, critically-minded Western. The account starts out reading like non-fiction; there is a narrator named Trystan, who has won this grant from UBCO to go the Best Western in Osoyoos and write “The Best Western.”
He gets himself a cowboy hat and heads on down to Osoyoos.
The award is meant to encourage undergraduate students who are enrolled in a major in FCCS B.A. or B.F.A. programs (English, Cultural Studies, Art History and Visual Culture, French, Spanish, Creative Writing, Visual Arts and Interdisciplinary Performance, or Combined Majors) to pursue innovative and original research under the supervision of one or more FCCS faculty members.
Two $2500 awards will be given out this year. The deadline for this award for a research project over the summer of 2016 is March 15th at 4pm. For more information on this award and the application process, visit fccs.ok.ubc.ca/students.html (under the Funding and Awards heading).