Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences > Research > FASS Research > Research Projects

Selected FASS Research Projects

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School of Criminology

The Institute for Canadian Urban Research Studies (ICURS) is undertaking several projects that look at providing general crime pattern identification and crime reduction decision-making support. Strategic projects are primarily at the municipality level, and look to understanding changes in crime patterns in support of ongoing crime reduction and prevention programs already undertaken by local police departments or detachments. Studies include: alcohol and drug use and crime; crime attractors and crime generators; crime and land use; and patterns of prolific offending.
Visit the ICURS website to learn more.

Visit the School website to learn more about other research projects in Criminology

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Department of Economics

Professor Greg Dow works on economic prehistory, labor-managed firms, microeconomic theory, and institutions. His work on economic prehistory includes a multi-year project with Clyde Reed funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) examining hunter-gatherer societies, the transition to agriculture, kinship systems, the origins of warfare, and related topics that combine data from archaeology and anthropology with verbal economic logic and formal modeling.
Visit Dr. Dow’s website to learn more.

Visit the Department website to learn more about other research projects in Economics.

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Department of English

Dr. Michelle Levy investigates the material practices that defined literary production and dissemination in the Romantic period, and she is particularly interested in the history of women’s writing and the interplay between the cultures of manuscript and print. She is currently working on a new book, Unprinted: Manuscript Culture and Social Media in the Romantic Age, which investigates the widespread circulation of unprinted literary works in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, providing the first comprehensive account of manuscript culture from 1770 through 1850.
Visit Dr. Levy’s website to learn more.

Visit the Department website to learn more about other research projects in English.

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Department of History

Dr. Luke Clossey's research interests encompass early-modern world history, with a focus on religion, globalization, and mathematics. He is currently finishing a project comparing ideas of universal empire among the Spanish, Mughal, Qing, and Burmese empires, and he is also developing a global history of understandings of Jesus, from Kamal Al-Din Al-Damiri to Thomas Jefferson. The project traces ideas and images of Jesus around the globe, with an eye to better understanding the meaning and implications of both globalization and modernization.
Visit Dr. Clossey’s website to learn more.

Visit the Department website to learn more about other research projects in History.


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Department of Humanities

Dr. Emily O'Brien works on the Italian Renaissance, with a particular focus on fifteenth-century Italian humanism and the Renaissance papacy. Her work to date focuses on the extensive writings of Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (later Pope Pius II, 1458-64). She is currently completing a book on his autobiography and a Latin-English edition of his and other humanists’ novelle. A new research project focuses on Renaissance Italian historical epics. 
Visit Dr. O'Brien’s website to learn more.

Visit the Department website to learn more about other research projects in Humanities.

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School for International Studies

The Human Security Report Project (HSRP) tracks global and regional trends in organized violence, their causes and consequences. Human security is the combination of threats associated with war, genocide, and the displacement of populations; unlike traditional concepts of security, which focus on defending borders from external military threats, human security is concerned with the security of individuals. Research findings and analyses are published in the Human Security Report, Human Security Brief series, and the miniAtlas of Human Security.  
Visit the Human Security Report Project website to learn more.

Visit the School website to learn more about other research projects in International Studies.

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Department of Linguistics

Dr. Chung-hye Han works on syntax, semantics and their interface, syntax and semantics of Korean, and linguistic applications of Tree Adjoining Grammars. One current project, supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) seeks to develop a wide-coverage synchronous formal grammar for syntax-semantics mapping in natural language which can facilitate many Natural Language Processing applications that make use of computational semantics such as natural language interfaces to database queries, dialog systems, question/answering and summarization.
Visit Dr. Han's website to learn more.

Visit the Department website to learn more about other research projects in Linguistics.

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Department of Philosophy

Dr. Holly Andersen works in the philosophy of science, and in metaphysics and epistemology. Much of her work relates to causation, and she is currently working on a project called "Causation in Complex Systems," which will culminate in a full metaphysical account of causation that encompasses both process-oriented and counterfactual-oriented accounts of causation. 
Visit Dr. Andersen's website to learn more.

Visit the Department website to learn more about other research projects in Philosophy.

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Department of Political Science

Dr. Genevieve Fuji Johnson works on contemporary Anglo-American political theory, feminist social and political thought, ancient Greek political thought, and a range of current public policy issues. She currently holds a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) grant to study deliberative democratic practices in Canadian public policy, including social housing, energy generation, and nuclear waste management.  Also in progress is a co-edited volume (with Loralea Michaelis) on conceptual and normative dimensions of political responsibility.
Visit Dr. Johnson's website to learn more.

Visit the Department website to learn more about other research projects in Political Science.

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Department of Psychology

Dr. Alexander Chapman conducts research on borderline personality disorder, self-harm, impulsivity, and on difficulties that people have in regulating their emotions. His current research includes projects on how emotions, life experiences, stress and coping styles affect self-harm, how different ways of managing emotions may help people cope in their daily lives, and the relationship between people's personality characteristics, social experiences, and coping styles.
Visit Dr. Chapman's website to learn more.

Visit the Department website to learn more about other research projects in Psychology.

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Department of Sociology and Anthropology

Dr. Michael Hathaway's current ethnographic project examines issues of globalization, commodification, and the making of transnational science through a study of a newly created global commodity, the matsutake mushroom. With funding by the Toyota Foundation and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), this project traces the social worlds fostered by this high-value wild mushroom in diverse social and physical settings such as British Columbia, the US Pacific Northwest, Northern Japan, and Southwest China.
Visit Dr. Hathaway’s website to learn more.

Visit the Department website to learn more about other research projects in Sociology and Anthropology.

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Urban Studies Program

Dr. Peter V. Hall's work bridges the disciplines of geography, planning and economics, often combining quantitative and qualitative social research methods. 
He is especially interested in the role of the local public sector in shaping the geography of economic activity and opportunity, with a focus on port cities, seaports and logistics. A current research project "Global Gateway, Local Benefit?" supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) focuses on the implications of the Asia-Pacific Gateway for the Vancouver metropolitan region.
Visit Dr. Hall’s website to learn more.

Visit the Program website to learn more about other research projects in Urban Studies.

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