Application: Please upload copies of the following by 4:30 PM on Thursday, 30 April 2026.
1)Cover letter indicating the course(s) you are applying for and preference;
2)Curriculum vitae, which includes a list of all Art History/Visual Art courses that you will have completed by August 31, 2026.
-Tutorial times can range between 9:00 am – 8:00 pm
-Students must be in British Columbia by the start date of a TA assignment in order to hold the appointment
UBC hires on the basis of merit and is committed to employment equity. We encourage all qualified applicants to apply. Successful applicants will become members of the Teaching Assistant union, CUPE 2278. Assignment of positions is guided by the stipulations within the collective agreement between UBC and CUPE 2278.
Books is pleased to announce the launch of Manga Matrix, a comic/manga artist book by Dan Starling, with contributions from Steffanie Ling, Deanna Li, Wake Cook, Siqi Yang, Tajliya Jamal, Natalia Soto, and Kobie Gingras-Fox. The book is risograph printed by Moniker Press.
Manga Matrix is inspired by the need for new post-colonial and post-patriarchal narratives that break with the conventions of storytelling in popular media and propose a new way to imagine ourselves individually and collectively. The starting point for the work is the narrative story arc of the hero’s journey and its persistent use in popular culture. To overcome this simplistic yet stubborn mythology, Manga Matrix seeks to maintain a state of tension in which conflict doesn’t resolve in an overly simplistic manner, realist conventions don’t suppress artifice, actions do not flow seamlessly, and interruption is the norm. The “conclusion” of the book consists of a series of lithographic prints that begin as representations but progressively become more and more layered with abstract images, obliterating the narrative and eventually becoming saturated with black ink so that the hero’s journey “stops being written”.
Erin Silver, Art and Feminisms: Histories, Methods, and Legacies (Routledge, 2026).
Book information:
Through an international cohort of contributors, this book examines the rich and diverse strands of artistic and cultural production from the nineteenth century to the present day that contribute to elastic and ever-expanding histories of feminist art.
The contributions facilitate an understanding of the complex histories of feminist art, material, and cultural production for both new and inveterate students and scholars, while complicating feminist art’s canonization by engaging questions and issues of history-writing itself. An implicit concern throughout the volume is how feminist art history has both addressed and, at times, been complicit in its own systems of exclusion. Foregrounding political and social movements and developments in related fields such as critical race studies, Indigenous studies, trans studies, disability studies, and critical ethnic studies in recent decades, this volume looks beyond the canonical lineage of feminist art history toward an expansive view of feminist art’s pasts, pitfalls, and potentials. The book also goes beyond the traditional visual arts to consider vernacular and material cultures in our increasingly visually oriented world (which encompasses the social media and citizen journalism accelerated in the COVID era).
The book will be of interest to scholars and students working in art history and gender studies.
Germaine Koh and Simona Dolinská, eds., League Play Book (Nanaimo Art Gallery, 2025).
Book Information:
League Play Book serves both as documentation of Germaine Koh’s ongoing League project focused on play as a creative practice, and as a kind of workbook that could inspire more invention.
The book is released in free digital edition and a limited-edition bookwork. It is sized for a standard North American three-hole binder, and the bookwork with custom binding is in an edition of 200. Read and download the free PDF at https://germainekoh.com/league-play-book-2025.pdf.
The book is arranged into three sections: Analysis, Plays, and Practice.
The short essays of the Analysis section are written by artists, athletes, scholars, game designers and players who have intimate, lived understanding of the processes of invention and discovery that can develop through play. They share their experiences of the anatomy and dynamics of ingenuity; the culturally radical potential of play; creative mindsets; psychological and cognitive processing; and the situations and settings for discovery. Some analyze the mechanics of how invention and decision-making happen in their fields. Others address how play works to create possibility by revising conventions.
Jesse Birch writes on learning through mimicry in skateboarding, Koh proposes vulnerability and uncertainty as key elements. League collaborator Bruce Emmett shares his recollections of how innovation unfolded at League events in conversation with objects and places. Considering the production of artworks, James Long looks at virtuosic plays of implicit meaning, while Eliot White-Hill narrates his development of work in relation to the traditional forms of his Coast Salish heritage. Revising social conventions, Simona Dolinská describes the potential of neurodivergent play and Elizabeth Nijdam considers critical play. Focusing closely on decision-making, Ian Verchère analyzes the mechanics of progression in games and action sports, Lindsey Freeman writes on the mind games of distance running, and Meaghan Hackinen traces some decision-making in emergent sport.
The Plays section collects case studies written by participants, which outline the creative processes that produced some of League’s events and products. These are not recipes, but they do try to identify the key ingredients, conditions and prompts that encouraged creative decisions.
The Practice section includes worksheets, rooms for notes, and space for users to record their own plays.
Jaleh Mansoor, Universal Prostitution and Modernist Abstraction (Duke University Press, 2025).
Book information:
In Universal Prostitution and Modernist Abstraction, Jaleh Mansoor provides a counternarrative of modernism and abstraction and a reexamination of Marxist aesthetics. Mansoor draws on Marx’s concept of prostitution—a conceptual device through which Marx allegorized modern labor—to think about the confluences of generalized and gendered labor in modern art. Analyzing works ranging from Édouard Manet’s Olympia and Georges Seurat’s The Models to contemporary work by Hito Steyerl and Hannah Black, she shows how avant-garde artists can detect changing modes of production and capitalist and biopolitical processes of abstraction that assign identities to subjects in the interest of value’s impersonal circulation. She demonstrates that art and abstraction resist modes of production and subjugation at the level of process and form rather than through referential representation. By studying gendered and generalized labor, abstraction, automation, and the worker, Mansoor shifts focus away from ideology, superstructure, and culture toward the ways art indexes crisis and transformation in the political economic base. Ultimately, she traces the outlines of a counterpraxis to capital while demonstrating how artworks give us a way to see through the abstractions of everyday life.
