What We Do
Our mission is to undertake research and creative activity of the highest caliber. We are strongly committed to the continued development of a Fine Arts and Humanities-based intellectual culture on the UBC Okanagan Campus and in the surrounding region.
Our Faculty are nationally recognized, and highly regarded, leaders in creative and critical scholarship encompassing diverse historical and contemporary experiences and perspectives. We have specialized expertise in Digital Arts and Humanities, World Literature, Literary Studies, Cultural Studies, Ecocriticism, Global Art History, Visual Arts, Performance, Indigenous Arts, Media Studies and Creative Writing.
We have two Canadian Foundation for Innovation funded research Centres in the Faculty along with two research Labs. Many of our Faculty members hold active Social Science and Humanities Research Council grants and benefit from Arts Council funding at civic, provincial and federal levels.
Centres & Labs
The AMP Lab houses projects that engage in the work of the humanities–adding value to cultural artifacts through interpretation and analysis–in a digital context. Broadly, all AMP Lab projects investigate code as a sustainable medium for representing cultural history. The stakes are high, as the development of sustainable, robust humanist data shapes what both scholars and the general public can know about digitized cultural history.
The Centre for Culture and Technology (CCT) was established in 2011 by FCCS professors Aleksandra Dulic and Stephen Foster to promote research that brings together art and science to develop a critical awareness of the dynamic relationship between culture and technology. As a laboratory engaged in innovative research, the CCT aims to develop content, artwork and services, support innovation processes, expand new knowledge transmission strategies for cultural expression, and communicate cultural knowledge to audiences across a range of age groups and cultures.
The Centre for Indigenous Media Arts (CIMA) is mandated to work collaboratively with artists and communities to foster the contemporary artistic practice of Indigenous media artists. The Centre focuses on research/creation of scholarly projects at the confluence of contemporary art and indigenous culture exploring new forms of media and technology in contemporary indigenous art production. CIMA is located at UBC’s Okanagan campus in the Administration Building (ADM 044).
The Research Studio for Spaces and Things (RSST) is an open platform for research and creation in the field of visual arts. The Studio is a transdisciplinary environment dedicated to the production and the presentation in 2D arts (drawing, painting, photography), 3D arts (installation, sculpture, design, architecture) and time-based practices (audio, video, performance). It will gather practitioners working across genres, disciplines and techniques. Contact: samuel.roy-bois@ubc.ca.
Public Humanities Hub
The Public Humanities Hub (PHH) initiative coordinates and amplifies the work of humanists on the Okanagan campus so that colleagues across the disciplines and citizens in the Southern Interior can see what they bring to the table.
- The hub identifies best practices in humanities capacity-building internationally
- It builds new research connections across Humanities departments, UBC faculties and the two campuses
- It supports research culture including graduate students and senior undergraduates
- It publicizes and mobilizes humanities research in the public sphere and facilitates exchanges amongst humanists at both the Okanagan and Vancouver campuses.
The Public Humanities Hub Okanagan (PHH-O) fosters collaboration and research excellence amongst humanists at UBC, and supports public-facing research in the humanities. The PHH-O will establish governance with an academic director, reporting to the Associate Dean of Research and Graduate Studies in FCCS, and a steering committee.
Project Highlights

Eco Art Incubator Project
The Eco-Art Incubator is an umbrella under which a variety of projects can proceed by our offering specific technical and theoretical support, providing a platform for students and artists to work as well as access to artist-friendly resources for conservation and ecological initiatives. This project is run by Nancy Holmes and Denise Kenney.

Confluence of Religious Cultures in Medieval Historiography
This project, led by Francisco Peña, positions the General e grand estoria within the multicultural context of its production and re-evaluates the role of Judaism and Islam, as well as the Graeco-roman classical traditions, in the birth of Spanish and European historical writing and the beginnings of vernacular fiction. Find out more…

Ghosts of Roberts Lake
Featured Publications

Jennifer Gustar
Ludics and Laughter as Feminist Aesthetic: Angela Carter at Play responds to this lacuna in Carter criticism. This international collection of eleven essays from acclaimed Carter scholars and emerging voices in the field of Carter studies seeks to reclaim play as a serious undertaking for feminist writing and scholarship and to foreground laughter as a potent affect.

Jordan Stouck
Writing Today offers students the comprehensive and detailed instruction they need using a highly-praised, interactive writing style that reflects the way they read and learn: instruction is succinct; key concepts are immediately defined and reinforced; paragraphs are short and supported by instructional visuals.

George Grinnell
Examining the ways in which hypochondria forms both a malady and a metaphor for a range of British Romantic writers, Grinnell contends that this is not one illness amongst many, but a disorder of the very ability to distinguish between illness and health, a malady of interpretation that mediates a broad spectrum of pressing cultural questions.

Allison Hargreaves
Violence against Indigenous women in Canada is an ongoing crisis, with roots deep in the nation’s colonial history. Centring the voices of contemporary Indigenous women writers, this book argues for the important role that literature and storytelling can play in response to gendered colonial violence.

Matt Rader
Composed over a period of profound illness, Visual Inspection is a searching reflection on poetry, power and our embodied lives. Shaped by matching elements of literary history, poetic practice, contemporary art, politics and ecology with Rader’s own experience of chronic illness and pain, Visual Inspection writes into and through what is accessible to our minds and bodies.

Briar Craig
Works on Paper and Other Things is a catalogue from the Vernon Public Art Gallery. This exhibition of text-based artwork consists of monoprints, UV screen prints, flickering neon signs and a large magnetic board with words which can be manipulated by the viewers in order to create sentences and statements. The works highlight the concept of chance and accident as a strategic concept in creating works of art.
Faculty Awards
Our faculty members are committed to recognizing outstanding and significant contributions to research, teaching and community engagement. Find out more about our award-winning colleagues.