65 UBC Arts researchers secure SSHRC funding in 2024 competition



A total of 65 projects led by UBC Faculty of Arts researchers were awarded funding through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)’s 2024 Partnership, Partnership Development, Insight, and Insight Development Grants competitions.

Learn more about the Arts recipients and their innovative research projects below.


Partnership Grants

Partnership Grants support large teams working in a formal collaboration between postsecondary institutions and public, private or not-for-profit organizations.

  • Dr. J. Kiley Hamlin, Professor, Department of Psychology
    Project: Building a network of networks in the big team social sciences

Partnership Development Grants

Partnership Development Grants provide short-term and timely support for partnered research activities that inform decision-making at a single partner organization from the public, private or not-for-profit sector.

  • Dr. Camilla Speller, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology
    Project: Xaʔaʔgaɬ: Documenting the long-term history and Indigenous management of Pacific salmon populations in K’ómoks traditional territory

Insight Grants

Insight Grants support research excellence in social sciences and humanities. Funding is available to both emerging scholars and established scholars for research initiatives of two to five years.

  • Dr. Siwan Anderson, Professor, Vancouver School of Economics
    Project: Gender norms
  • Dr. Susan Birch, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology
    Project: Changing lives by changing minds: Enhancing social emotional competence by combining multiple evidence-based approaches
  • Dr. Sophie Borwein, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science
    Project: The supply-side politics of workplace technological change
  • Dr. Katherine Bowers, Associate Professor, Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies
    Project: Computational Dostoevsky
  • Dr. Lisa Coulthard, Professor, Department of Theatre & Film
    Project: Historicizing stunt performance, workflows, and labour in American cinema
  • Dr. Giovanni Gallipoli, Professor, Vancouver School of Economics
    Project: Heterogeneity and the mechanics of inequality: Consumption expenditures in the cross-section and across generations
  • Dr. David Gramling, Professor, Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies
    Project: Linguaphobia, linguistic indifference, and the monolingual university
  • Dr. Michael Griffin, Professor, Department of Philosophy
    Project: Transforming logic, rhetoric, and the sciences in late antiquity: Seven new volumes in the Ancient Commentators Series
  • Dr. Carrie Jenkins, Professor, Department of Philosophy
    Project: The undisciplined project
  • Dr. Vinay Kamat, Professor, Department of Anthropology
    Project: Climate change, ecological risk, and adaptive capacity among artisanal fishing communities in coastal Tanzania
  • Dr. Hiroyuki Kasahara, Professor, Vancouver School of Economics
    Project: Identification and estimation of markup, factor-neutral and factor-augmenting productivities, and production function using revenue data and their empirical applications
  • Naomi Klein, Associate Professor, Department of Geography
    Project: Mapping far-right climate discourse and policy in Canada, the United States, Argentina, and Aotearoa/New Zealand
  • Dr. Dominic McIver Lopes, Professor, Department of Philosophy
    Project: Pluralism and its discontents: Episodes in the history of aesthetics
  • Dr. Vadim Marmer, Professor, Vancouver School of Economics
    Project: Unknown group structures in econometric models
  • Dr. Sara Milstein, Professor, Department of Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies
    Project: Translating sex in the Hebrew Bible
  • Dr. Marcin Morzycki, Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics
    Project: Numerals and measurement across constructions and languages
  • Dr. Sam Norris, Assistant Professor, Vancouver School of Economics
    Project: The effects of alternative criminal justice institutions
  • Dr. Geraldine Pratt, Professor, Department of Geography
    Project: The new labour of elder care: Past, present and future geographies of cobot care technologies
  • Dr. W. Craig Riddell, Professor Emeritus, Vancouver School of Economics
    Project: Improving the lives of welfare recipients: What pays off in the long run?
  • Dr. Hotze Rullmann, Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics
    Project: The language(s) of stories: What narrative discourse can tell us about the core properties of language
  • Dr. Elizabeth Shaffer, Assistant Professor, School of Information
    Project: Exploring Black Caribbean and diasporic communities’ anti-colonial archival practices: Toward a theory of archival wake work
  • Dr. Henry Siu, Professor, Vancouver School of Economics
    Project: Occupations and life-cycle wage growth: Implications for cross-cohort and racial and ethnic inequality
  • Dr. Kyungchul (Kevin) Song, Professor, Vancouver School of Economics
    Project: A systematic study on causal inference designs and statistical inference
  • Dr. Munir Squires, Assistant Professor, Vancouver School of Economics
    Project: Intermarriage and social integration in the United States, 1790-1950
  • Dr. Veena Sriram, Assistant Professor, School of Public Policy and Global Affairs
    Project: One country, one exam: Exploring the promise and pitfalls of India’s transition to single medical college entrance and exit examinations
  • Dr. Michael Tenzer, Professor,  School of Music
    Project: Irregular meters of the world: Theory, analysis, performance and composition
  • Dr. Coll Thrush, Professor, Department of History
    Project: The train to Weeping Water: Colonialism, migration, and critical family history
  • Dr. Jessica Wang, Professor, Department of Geography & History
    Project: Biogeography, state power, and colonial rule: Tropical agriculture and the U.S. insular empire, 1898-1940
  • Dr. Helena Zeweri, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology
    Project: The colonial history and present of Australia’s transnational border regime
  • Dr. Gaoheng Zhang, Associate Professor, Department of French, Hispanic and Italian Studies
    Project: Scrambles for East Africa: Media and cultural debates between China, Western Europe, and East Africa
  • Dr. Mila Zuo, Associate Professor, Department of Theatre & Film
    Project: Mongoloids – An experimental documentary

Insight Development Grants

Insight Development Grants support research in its initial stages. The grants enable the development of new research questions, as well as experimentation with new methods, theoretical approaches and/or ideas.

  • Dr. Afsoun Afsahi, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science
    Project: Unequal voices, unequal rules: Reimagining democracy’s boundaries
  • Dr. Marie-Eve Bouchard, Assistant Professor, Department of French, Hispanic and Italian Studies
    Project: The use of English-origin verbs in Quebec French
  • Dr. Amanda Cheong, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology
    Project: Investigating barriers to birth registration among labour migrant families in the Malaysian palm oil sector
  • Dr. Bonnie Effros, Professor, Department of History
    Project: Salomon Reinach and the politics of assimilation in early twentieth-century France
  • Dr. Avery Everhart, Assistant Professor, Department of Geography
    Project: Beyond binary data: The role of data, statistics, and information in shaping transgender life
  • Dr. Giovanni Gallipoli, Professor, Vancouver School of Economics
    Project: The mechanics of consumption networks: Theory and measurement
  • Dr. Ying Gao, Assistant Professor, Vancouver School of Economics
    Project: Incentives and learning in platforms with recommendation
  • Dr. Zahra Hayat, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology
    Project: ‘Pharmaceutical intellectual property’: Patents, trade secrets and access to medicines
  • Dr. Isabella Huberman, Assistant Professor, Department of French, Hispanic and Italian Studies
    Project: Powerlines: Re-storying hydro power in Quebec through Indigenous narrative arts
  • Dr. Katharine Huemoeller, Assistant Professor, Department of Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies
    Project: Domina: Gendering slaveholding in the Roman world
  • Dr. Torsten Jaccard, Assistant Professor, Vancouver School of Economics
    Project: Multinationals, export quality, and the gains from trade
  • Dr. Andrew Jorgenson, Professor, Department of Sociology
    Project: Income inequality, economic growth, and the climate crisis: Longitudinal analyses of province-level carbon emissions in Canada
  • Dr. Anna Jurkevics, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science
    Project: A right to place? Mapping the divide between European and Indigenous approaches to land
  • Dr. Aryan Karimi, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology
    Project: Past losses and future lives: Afghan and Ukrainian women in Canada
  • Dr. Hiroyuki Kasahara, Professor, Vancouver School of Economics
    Project: The impact of artificial intelligence adoption on skill demands and productivity: Evidence from newly linked administrative firm-level data in Canada
  • Dr. Kristin Laurin, Professor, Department of Psychology
    Project: Actual and perceived political residue after religious switching: Implications for secularization
  • Dr. Katherine Lyon, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology
    Project: Does STEM identity matter?: Longitudinally tracing the relationship between STEM identity and STEM trajectory persistence for girls and gender-expansive youth across the socioeconomic spectrum
  • Dr. Gregory Mackie, Associate Professor, Department of English Language and Literatures
    Project: Looking for Mabel: A bibliocritical study of Mrs. Chan-Toon
  • Dr. Anabel Maler, Assistant Professor, School of Music
    Project: The signing musician: Composer, performer, analyst
  • Dr. Kathryn McConnell, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology
    Project: Investigating post-wildfire housing recovery and gentrification dynamics in Canada and the U.S.
  • Dr. Diana Moreiras Reynaga, Honorary Research Associate, Department of Anthropology
    Project: New insights on Mesoamerican human sacrifice from two postclassic Mesoamerican civilizations through decolonial, proteomic, and isotopic approaches
  • Dr. Vin Nardizzi, Professor, Department of English Language and Literatures
    Project: Thomasin Tunstall: A botanical biography
  • Dr. Elizabeth Nijdam, Assistant Professor, Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies
    Project: Games for decolonization
  • Dr. Joan Danielle Ongchoco, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology
    Project: The missing self in time: Studies in perception, action, and decision-making
  • Dr. Ethan Raker, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology
    Project: The fertility and natality consequences of the 2021 heat dome in British Columbia
  • Dr. Raffaele Saggio, Associate Professor, Vancouver School of Economics
    Project: The impact of reducing access to temporary foreign work visas in Canada
  • Dr. Elif Sari Ozcelik, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology
    Project: Privatizing LGBTQ+ asylum: An ethnographic exploration of Canada’s private refugee sponsorship
  • Dr. Paul Schrimpf, Associate Professor, Vancouver School of Economics
    Project: Unintended consequences of cash transfers on opioid overdoses and effects of expanding contraceptive access: Evidence from BC’s free contraceptives program
  • Dr. Rosanne Sia, Assistant Professor, Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice
    Project: Performing the “Asian woman”: Traveling Asian performers on Canadian variety circuits
  • Dr. Daniel Starling, Assistant Professor, Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory
    Project: The pencil of nature: Redux
  • Dr. Philip Yoo, Assistant Professor, Department of Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies
    Project: “And they could not speak…”: The Bible and language endangerment
  • Dr. Keren Zaiontz, Assistant Professor, Department of Theatre & Film
    Project: Performing the press against autocracy