The Arts One program is composed of a team of dedicated instructors who help facilitate a positive and encouraging transition into university for first-year students. This interview series helps both current and prospective Arts One students get to know individual instructors on the teaching team. Whether you are an incoming first-year student who is still deciding which Arts One seminar to take, or a current Arts One student who wants to know more about the professors in your stream, this series is for you.
We reached out to Dr. Brandon Konoval (School of Music), who has been an instructor in Arts One for over 25 years. He reflects on his longstanding connection to, and experiences in the program. Furthermore, he brings his work on the genealogies of inequality, morality and sexuality, as well as the relationship between music, mathematics and early modern science into conversation with the program, including this year’s theme “Border Crossings.” Dr. Konoval also highlights the accomplishments of his students, emphasizing the diverse range of academic and career pathways that Arts One students pursue, and Arts One as “a place of adventure, where odysseys begin.”
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? How long have you been teaching in Arts One?
I began teaching in Arts One in September of 1999. I still remember reading Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality in a tent over several nights while backpacking through the Rockies in August of 1999—the “Iceline” trail in Yoho, a favourite route—preparing myself for a new kind of adventure.
What made you decide to join the Arts One teaching team?
My connection with Arts One began with two faculty members from UBC History who had regularly taught in the program since the 1970s: Ed Hundert, a professor of intellectual history who also served as Chair of Arts One for many years, and Stephen Straker, who was for many years UBC’s professor for the history and philosophy of science, and who’d been encouraging me to pursue research on the relationship between music and early modern science. Stephen had piqued my interest in the program, to the extent that I dropped in on several Arts One lectures to see what was being discussed. However, it was Ed who directly recruited me, casually interviewing me over lunch, and then encouraging me to apply for a group organized around the theme of Utopia/Dystopia. The team leaders liked my ideas and suggestions—including that we really ought to read Thomas More’s Utopia, the subject of my first lecture for the program—and I’ve been with Arts One ever since, while continuing to teach at the School of Music.
Ed and Stephen have remained my Arts One role models: whether as teachers, as scholars, or quite simply as thinkers, for me they embody the Arts One ethos of independent inquiry, as well as the conviction that the spirit of inquiry isn’t bound by disciplinary borders. You could say that, for me, “Border Crossings” has been the underlying theme of every year I’ve devoted to Arts One since 1999.
Your work has explored the genealogies of inequality, morality, and sexuality developed by Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Foucault; you’ve also written on the relationship between music, mathematics, and early modern science. Could you tell us more about these topics, and how you will bring them into conversation with the issues discussed in the Arts One lectures and seminars this year?
Those are big topics! And that’s why they’ve played such a productive role in our program. Each year in Arts One we sail through an ocean of works, oriented by themes like “Border Crossings” that help us to navigate an incredibly diverse array of materials. Our themes provide us with a yearly compass bearing; nevertheless, the oceans through which we transit as a program—from one theme to the next, and over the course of several decades by now—are often fed by deeper thematic undercurrents that continually circulate through Arts One. Inequality, morality, and sexuality are great examples of these ‘transoceanic’ undercurrents: they may surface at times as the explicit subject for a text that I’ve written about and lectured on for Arts One—works such as Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality (1755), Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality (1887), or Foucault’s History of Sexuality (1976)—but these issues suffuse many other works in which their role might not be quite as transparent.
For example, if you wanted to explore the issue of inequality, you’d find it to be a central concern in many texts on this year’s list of works, such as More’s Utopia (1516), in which the idea of a society without poverty or any private property is envisaged; or again in The Interesting Narrative (1789), Olaudah Equiano’s memoir of his experiences first as a slave and then as a freed man, who seeks to end the transatlantic slave trade through his writing. Likewise, morality is central to conceptions of ‘the good life’ developed in Plato’s Republic and in Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651), but then it’s hard to think of a work we will be studying in the coming year that isn’t concerned with morality. Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, or Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home all explore the theme of sexuality as associated with identity—an association highlighted in Foucault’s History of Sexuality—but we will already find sexuality weaving an ensnaring thread throughout the very first work on our reading list, Homer’s Odyssey. So, I’d suggest that all of us on the faculty team for “Border Crossings” are engaged in this “genealogy” of inequality, morality, and sexuality—a term I’ve borrowed from Nietzsche, which speaks to how we have come to be as modern persons, in continuing engagement with these core concerns of modern society.
The music/math thematic undercurrent appears somewhat less frequently in Arts One given its more technical nature, although it played a key role when I lectured on Plato’s Timaeus as part of a unit on stories of origins that included Genesis and West Coast Indigenous traditions, among others. The Timaeus tells a Pythagorean story of the creation of the cosmos from a kind of harmonic ‘big bang,’ a Pythagorean tradition that also plays a significant role in Plato’s Republic—specifically, in its account of the mathematical nature of important forms of knowledge, and of the forms of training necessary for the education of a philosophical ruler.
The origin story of early modern science itself is in many respects the story of Galileo. I always look forward to sharing my interest in astronomy and knowledge of early modern cosmology whenever we read Galileo’s “Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina” (1615) and Bertolt Brecht’s play, The Life of Galileo, as we’ll do this year in “Border Crossings”: Galileo took an extraordinary scientific leap that crossed the boundary between the earth and the heavens, with consequences as numerous as the myriad of stars he was astonished to see in the depths of the night sky when first looking through the telescope he’d designed. When I project telescope images in the darkened lecture theatre or seminar room as part of my discussion of Galileo’s discoveries, it reminds me of the star- and planet-gazing I’ve loved to share with my son on our hikes through the Rockies and coastal ranges over the years.
In your opinion, what makes Arts One unique?
Uniqueness can emerge from familiar components when they are coordinated in a novel way. Arts One offers a particularly striking example of this with our distinctive lecture-seminar-tutorial sequence, which unfolds through overlapping two-week cycles over the course of the full year.
For example, nobody would be surprised to encounter a university course with lectures, but Arts One uses each lecture to initiate an experience that always comes to focus on students themselves. Our faculty members give a keynote lecture at the start of each week, providing a helpful introduction to material that we then explore more fully through two weeks of seminars and tutorials. This sets up a role reversal: each cycle that begins with students listening to faculty in a lecture setting—discussing the work of certain authors or other kinds of creators—ends only when those same professors are listening attentively to their students in tutorials. Students themselves then become both our authors—whose essays we analyze and discuss—and, correspondingly, our lecturers, in the sense that they guide us to a better understanding and appreciation of the works they comment on. Nevertheless, because we have a faculty team that combines many different interests and areas of expertise, Arts One students gain a more holistic perspective of the university through our team approach to lecturing and to teaching in general. Even our essay topics are the result of weekly faculty team discussions, where we share ideas that shape how we approach our seminar discussions as well.
Like lectures, seminars are also a familiar feature of academic life, typically encountered as upper-level undergraduate courses or in graduate programs (such as I’ve taught for the School of Music). However, inviting students to participate in a seminar at the very start of their university experience—working directly with a professor and student colleagues, giving them a highly personal role in their own education—is a striking departure from the usual practice. This kind of academic initiation originally comes from 19th century German universities, where joining a seminar right at entry to the university was designed to encourage independent research and inquiry as soon as possible. Seminars are also a great way for students new to UBC campus to get to know one another, a setting in which I have seen many wonderful friendships flourish alongside academic collegiality for all.
Tutorials with faculty members are a regular feature of some universities: several former students from my seminar have told me how their tutorial experience in Arts One effectively prepared them for their tutorial experience as graduate students at Oxford and Cambridge. (Although one of them—studying history and philosophy of science at Darwin College, Cambridge—noted that Arts One doesn’t hold its tutorials in pubs.) But I agree with so many of my colleagues who find the heart of Arts One in its tutorials, where each and every student has the weekly opportunity to discuss either their own work or that of their tutorial colleagues. This is a model experience of peer review—which all faculty themselves experience when we publish our own work—but our face-to-face discussions with each other in Arts One tutorials feel more like a workshop or writers’ room, talking about something that we already like in an essay but perhaps want to highlight more, or what we’d like to add, reshape or reconsider.
“It’s what makes writing come alive as a creative rather than formulaic activity—experiential learning of the most personal kind. Through weekly tutorials, every Arts One student becomes an author with an audience, and can experience the special pleasure that comes when you know your ideas have hit home.”
During your time teaching in Arts One so far, which theme(s)—whether it’s the current “Border Crossings” theme, or past themes—have stood out to you the most?
That’s like being asked to identify one’s favourite child! Nevertheless, one giveaway could be the re-use of a particular theme: for example, we’ve worked with “Dangerous Questions/Forbidden Knowledge”—a theme originally envisaged by Stephen Straker—three times since I’ve been with Arts One (2000–2002, 2010–2012, 2018–2020). Much the same could be said for our current theme, “Border Crossings” (2024–2026), which resonates in so many ways with “Explorations and Encounters” (2012–2014)—thematic odysseys that we retrace in some ways, and begin afresh in some others.
That being said, when I wrote an article featuring Arts One for the 50th Anniversary issue of Higher Education Review (Is the Essay Dead?), I chose to highlight “Hero/Antihero” (2014–2016) as an example of a classic Arts One theme and reading list. That was the first time I got to pair discussions of Machiavelli’s The Prince with Shakespeare’s Prince Hamlet, seeing both works in ways I’d never dreamed of before—Machiavelli on the theatre of power, Shakespeare on the legitimacy of either holding or taking hold of power. We began each year of “Hero/Antihero” with the Odyssey and then the Aeneid, witnessing the same figure, Odysseus/Ulysses, treated as both hero and villain, the very embodiment of our theme. And all the works we selected for “Hero/Antihero” continued to question and probe that problematic binary, which was a pleasure to explore.
Sometimes exploring a theme and its works can feel like undertaking a more personal odyssey. With “Sources of the Self” (2022–2024), the works we considered and the discussions we had in those years made me think much more about how I understood myself as a person, and how my own sense of identity has evolved through the course of my life and career. Studying the works of others can become a study of that “piece of work” (as Hamlet puts it) that is ourselves.
One of the features of Arts One is that you guide students through a text that you may never have encountered before, or at least haven’t engaged with in many years. Is there such a text on the Border Crossings reading list that is especially rewarding to work on?
Like our students, even faculty who have been with the program for many years have the frequent experience of encountering new or unfamiliar works—and for a good reason. One of the distinctive features of Arts One is its integration of faculty like me—that is, a professor with a permanent position in the program itself (who also serves in another department)—with professors who have permanent positions in other departments but are eager to come and teach in Arts One: these enthusiastic colleagues usually stay with Arts One for the two-year cycle of a particular theme, bringing their distinctive interests and expertise along with them. They have been crucial to the vitality of Arts One, constantly refreshing our curriculum and keeping both people like me and the program itself in touch with the interests and evolution of the university as a whole.
For example, when Prof. Christine Evans (Theatre and Film) joined our team for “Border Crossings,” I was excited to see all the new works she brought to Arts One, and to see where these works would take me. Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) opened new doors of perception, not just with respect to film itself—when I saw Le Samouraï (1967) at a repertory cinema last fall, my recent experience with Vertigo made me feel as if I was seeing Melville’s film with a new set of eyes—but also with respect to a classic text like Ovid’s Metamorphoses (there’s a striking Pygmalion theme in Vertigo), and even to music. In fact, I now use parts of Bernard Hermann’s amazing score for Vertigo in a music theory class I teach for the UBC School of Music, as it vividly demonstrates key developments in musical modernism and the compelling reasons behind them.
But Prof. Evans also introduced me to a great text that I was long overdue to read: Charles Baudelaire’s Salon of 1859, a profoundly insightful work of art criticism that reflects upon the relationship between technology and creativity, as relevant in 2025 as it was in 1859. In fact, maybe even more so: one of my students, Angelia Thomson, wrote a fascinating capstone paper, “Algorithms and Taste: Revisiting Baudelaire in the Age of Streaming” (which everyone can read here), in which Angelia took an essay she’d written on the Salon of 1859 and further developed Baudelaire’s ideas and concerns through the modern world of musical creativity, music production (not necessarily the same thing), and taste formation (the Almighty Algorithm). I guess you could say that if Vertigo gave me a new set of eyes, Baudelaire—with the help of both a faculty and a student colleague—gave me a new pair of ears.
What would you tell a student considering Arts One, but who hasn’t yet decided?
First, I’d recommend checking out what a recent Arts One student like Vivian Bruce has to say about the program. Vivian talks about many aspects of her Arts One experience, including both the rewards and the challenges, and how her experience led to the next steps she has taken at UBC. (And if you’d like to see something she wrote while in Arts One—not to mention, a great example of the type of comparative discussions we often explore in our regular essays—I’d highly recommend her essay on Sophocles’ Antigone and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Mary: A Fiction).
As for my own perspective, and having taught in Arts One for some time now, what has stood out the most for me is its support for individuality: I can never predict in what direction students like Vivian or Angelia will pursue their interests and ambitions, but they have found a launchpad for those personal pursuits in Arts One, and I always look forward to seeing the outcome. To give just a few examples of those outcomes from UBC graduates who were in my seminar, Dr. Kathryn Kelley (Arts One 2004) earned her PhD in Assyriology through the Oxford Oriental Institute (2018), with research that has taken her to archaeological sites and museums across the Middle East and Europe (not to mention, acquiring a singular expertise in the beer-brewing entrepreneurship of Babylonian women); Dr. Nolan Bett (Arts One 2005) completed a PhD in salmon studies and is now my colleague at UBC in the Faculty of Science, having taught in our sister program, Science One; Esinam M. D. Agbemenu (Arts One 2009) earned her J. D. at the Columbia Law School, and has also taught law both at Columbia itself and at the Fordham University School of Law; with a PhD in History from Stanford University, Dr. Aidan Forth (Arts One 2000) has become a leading scholar on global empires, authoring books such as Barbed-Wire Imperialism: Britain’s Empire of Camps, 1876–1903 (University of California Press, 2017) and Camps: A Global History of Mass Confinement (University of Toronto Press, 2024); and Zehra Naqvi (Arts One 2012), who became a Rhodes Scholar (2018) and earned graduate degrees in migration studies at Oxford, founded The Estuary Institute and has recently published her first book, The Knot of My Tongue: Poems and Prose (McClelland & Stewart/Penguin Random House, 2024).
That’s just a small selection of the extraordinary variety of student achievements I could share from my seminar—and but a fraction of all of our seminars—but it already indicates the astonishing range of pathways that students have begun to find for themselves through their studies in Arts One. And I really appreciate the growth and transformation of students I already get to see right here within Arts One itself, whether it’s finding their voice in their writing or finding their voice in seminar: nothing beats the experience of seeing a student who might feel a bit shy to talk in a group feel the need to contribute to a discussion, and join in for the first time.
“So, for someone considering our program, I’d say that Arts One is a place of adventure, where odysseys begin.”
