The Graduate Program in Germanic Studies at UBC integrates a large scope of thematic and theoretical research areas. Students are guided by faculty whose teaching and research cover the full range of German literature and culture from medieval to the present. Course offerings comprise approaches from historical, cultural, media, performance and gender studies. The program's structure encourages students to develop their individual focus of study and research. Students have the opportunity to develop a comprehensive knowledge of German literary texts in their aesthetic, social, political, (inter-)cultural, and historical dimensions. They will learn how to apply a variety of critical methods and theories to the study of literary texts, refine literary sensibilities, analytical skills and conceptual abilities. We offer professional development opportunities such as Teaching and Research Assistantships.
We are one of North America's top departments for Northern and Central European languages, with a thriving cohort of German and Swedish-language students and outstanding Polish, Danish and Russian language programs.
We encourage our MA students to pursue German cultural and literary studies with an interdisciplinary approach.
Our faculty, whose expertise lies in all areas of German, Baltic, Scandinavian, and Slavic studies, including gender, film and media studies, as well as second language acquisition, prepare students for their future endeavours and engage them in a diversity of professional development opportunities.
Our faculty are dedicated teachers who are regularly honoured with prestigious teaching awards.
The Master’s program is intended as preparation for a career in teaching and provides a possible foundation for advancement to a PhD in Germanic Studies. Our Teaching Assistants receive supervision and guidance to become effective and engaging instructors. Recent graduates have become sessional instructors of German, and have received recognition for excellent teaching evaluations. Other recent graduates have gone on to pursue studies at UBC, Cornell University, law studies at the University of Calgary, and art studies at McGill.
UBC's Asian Studies Department is the flagship Asian Studies department in Canada and is widely acknowledged as one of the finest in North America. The Department awards a thesis-based MA in Asian Studies to students working in a variety of regions and disciplines.
The department boasts over 20 graduate faculty, as well as a many tenure-track instructors and lecturers with wide-ranging expertise. Our more than 60 graduate students specialize in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and South Asian Studies and craft individual programs within and across various humanities disciplines, including linguistics, literary study, history, philosophy, religious studies, and popular and visual culture. The Department offers instruction in the following languages: Cantonese, Modern and Classical Chinese, Hindi/Urdu, Modern and Classical Japanese, Korean, Persian, Punjabi, and Sanskrit.
The department is a hub for research activities related to Asia, including large collaborative projects, multiple lecture series and workshops, and professional development opportunities, which provide students ample opportunities to develop their expertise, pursue their interests, and develop professional connections with scholars from around the world. It also regularly hosts postdoctoral fellows and visiting scholars. The program offers a range of funding opportunities and support for research activities.
In addition to our strengths in language and literary studies, the Asian Studies Department stands out for the geographic and disciplinary breadth of its faculty. It offers a range of coursework, from specialized research seminars to comparative Pan-Asian, methodological and professional development courses, drawing on the diversity of faculty and student specializations.
The UBC Library is the second-largest research library in Canada and the Asian Library boasts one of the finest Asian collections in North America, with a particular strength in East Asian materials.
Students pursuing the MA degree have gone on to top-ranked PhD programs around the world; others have put their skills to use in public service, education, journalism, translation, publishing, museums and cultural education, consulting, and business.
The University of British Columbia offers a Master of Arts in Children’s Literature (MACL) Program, jointly offered by the Departments of English and Language and Literacy Education, the Creative Writing Program, and the School of Library, Archival & Information Studies. The program provides specialized education for graduate students in the study of children’s and young adult literature and media using a multi-disciplinary approach. It provides each student with the opportunity to study the creative writing and publishing of this literature, to examine models of sharing its rich heritage with the young, and also to facilitate the literary, social, historic, and psychological analyses of children’s literature as literature. This multi-disciplinary approach exposes students to many schools of literary criticism, educational theory, and professional and creative practice. It acquaints students with the broad literary canon of children’s literature across a spectrum of languages and cultures, and with a variety of critical perspectives and professional application. Across various disciplines, departments, and faculties, a broad range of courses provide disciplined, academic study of children’s and young adult literature and media.
The MACL Program is the only one of its kind in the world offered from such a broad, multidisciplinary perspective and the only Master's program in children's literature in Canada. The program is unique in that the two faculties and the four academic units jointly provide faculty, courses, thesis supervision and committee support to give the graduate academic study of children’s literature a perspective on the full life cycle of the literature – the creation of the literature (through Creative Writing), its critical analysis (through English) and pedagogical approaches to the literature in interaction with children in schools, homes and libraries (Language and Literacy Education; School of Library, Archival & Information Studies).
Faculty in these departments are authors of both acclaimed children's books and scholarly guides to the literature. They serve on national and international children’s book juries, lead national research studies, and have received awards for scholarship, service, and teaching.
The University Library collections in historical and contemporary children’s books and the critical study of children's literature are considered among the strongest such collections in an academic library in Canada, including some 4,000 early and rare children's books and some 50,000 modern children’s books. As well, the Library maintains a large collection of research materials on children's literature, including histories, criticisms, bibliographies, catalogues, and biographies.
The UBC English Graduate Program, one of the most vibrant and wide-ranging in Canada, has been awarding the M.A. degree since 1919. Students may earn the degree in each of two areas: English Literature and English Language. Indeed, the UBC English Department is one of the few departments in North America to offer a language program in addition to its literary programs.
The English Language program includes specializations in history and structure of language, discourse and genre analysis, and history and theory of rhetoric. Faculty members in the Language program teach and supervise research in descriptive linguistics, historical linguistics, cognitive linguistics, functional grammar, semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, stylistics, genre studies, and history and theory of rhetoric. Students in the English Literature program can take advantage of Language graduate courses; recent offerings include courses on reported speech and its rhetorical versatility across genres; the uses of classical rhetoric for contemporary critical practice; and cognitive approaches to the language of literature. By the same token, Language students can take advantage of the wide variety of Literature courses our department offers.
The English Literature program includes specializations across the periods, genres, and major figures of British, North American and World Literature in English. Current research initiatives on the part of faculty include such diverse topics as the ecocritical study of Renaissance drama; the triumph of transport in Romantic poetry; the impact of radio and television on modernist poetics; the politics of post-identity in Asian American literature, and the role of war and its traumatic shocks in twentieth-century Canadian, U.S. and British literature. Graduate students can also choose to work across disciplinary fields, taking advantage of UBC's outstanding interdisciplinary programs in Medieval Studies, Canadian and U.S. Studies, Studies in Sexuality, and Science and Technology Studies, among others.
The M.A can be completed with or without thesis, in one or two years, and in full- or part-time programs.
The department is unique in Canada by offering two tiers of programs in English Literature and English Language and Linguistics at the graduate and undergraduate levels. We teach courses in all of the literary historical periods (Medieval, Early Modern, Eighteenth Century, Romantic, Victorian, Modernist, Postmodern, and Contemporary), national, transnational, postcolonial, transpacific, and Indigenous literatures in English, as well as language, linguistics, rhetoric, critical theory, media studies, and a range of interdisciplinary topics.
As reflected in their field-leading research and publications, our department members are among the most productive in Canada. Our diverse expertise is well reflected in books published in 2012 and 2013 alone. We also work on collaborative research projects across the world, many funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and other significant funding bodies, on topics such as ecology and literature, English linguistics, rhetoric and science, musical-textual improvisation, and narratives of migration. Many of our faculty are currently engaged in projects devoted to new and digital media and are pioneering their intersection with both established and emerging modes of humanities research.
The Graduate Program in French Studies offers a dynamic curriculum that focuses on a contextualized understanding of the languages, literatures, and cultures of France, Québec and the Francophone world. Students may specialize in literature or linguistics, or propose a research program combining both fields.
The first MA in French was conferred in 1922, and of UBC's first one hundred theses, six were in French literature.
Students have the possibility of holding Teaching Assistantships and Research Assistantships. Our students have access, in addition to all the libraries of UBC, to a Reading Room with a collection of several thousand books, as well as computers.
A Graduate Forum, organized by students in conjunction with faculty members, is held once a month. Every year a symposium is held at which students present their research to the department.
The M.A. prepares students for teaching positions in junior colleges. Students who recently graduated have pursued their studies in Library Science, Education, and French studies at the doctoral level at universities such as The University of Toronto, Stanford University and Yale University. In addition, former students have obtained positions in the public and private sectors.
The Graduate Program in Hispanic Studies offers a dynamic curriculum focusing on a contextualized knowledge of the languages, literatures, and cultures of Latin America, Spain and other Spanish-speaking communities within the US and Canada. The following areas of research are central to the curriculum and intellectual agenda of the program: the current state of literary, cultural and linguistic criticism, visual culture, contemporary debates on the first nations of the Hispanic World, redefinition of minorities in the digital age, and specific issues concerning multilingualism and multiculturalism.
The first M.A. in Spanish was conferred in the early 1950s.
Students have the possibility of holding Teaching Assistantships and Research Assistantships. Our students have access, in addition to all the libraries of UBC, to a Reading Room with a collection of several thousand books, as well as computers. A
Graduate Forum, organized by students in conjunction with faculty members, is held once a month. Every year a symposium is held at which students present their research to the department.
The M.A. prepares students for teaching positions in junior colleges. Students who recently graduated have pursued their studies in Library Science, Education, and Hispanic studies at the doctoral level. In addition, former students have obtained positions in the public and private sectors.
The Human Development, Learning, and Culture (HDLC) program at UBC addresses the interface of research and practice in education, weaving together theoretical models and concepts in their application to real world educational issues. Investigations of learning and development, including the unique contributions of culture to these processes, are applied to a wide range of contexts including classroom, afterschool, work, and technological contexts. This work is interpreted through a variety of theoretical lenses (e.g., constructivist, cognitive, sociocultural, and social and emotional development). Students are encouraged to participate in research and teaching opportunities throughout their program.
Coursework emphasizes three primary areas: a) learning and development, b) culture and diversity, and c) research methods, including qualitative and quantitative, experimental and developmental.
HDLC graduates have found careers in a variety of settings including university teaching and research, social policy analysis, curriculum and program evaluation, schools and community organizations, and corporate learning communities.
ISGP is a unique program that gives students the freedom to create their own individualized graduate program based on specific research interests. It allows students to bridge two or more academic disciplines.
ISGP gives you the opportunity to…
