NCC News: News

Announcement of New Librarian Representative on the NCC Council

We are delighted to announce that Matthew Hayes, Japanese Collections Librarian at Duke University, is our incoming Librarian Representative and will join the NCC Council, beginning January 2023. Dr. Hayes is an educator and award-winning researcher with comprehensive training in East Asian languages and religious cultures, and with experience in archival preservation and metadata collection of rare Japanese texts, especially Buddhist texts. He received his PhD from the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2020 on the topic of “Faith, Devotion, and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge: Ritual Learning and Kōshiki Performance in Early Modern Japan.” He conducted original research (2016–2017) at Taisho and Waseda Universities (Tokyo), as well as archival research at Chishakuin Temple (Kyoto), which resulted in a large-scale examination of issues surrounding ritual knowledge production in an early modern (1603–1868) Japanese Buddhist liturgy.

Although relatively new to librarianship, Hayes has already made significant contributions to the field through his work with NCC’s Resource Sharing Committee (formerly ILL-DD) and as a member of our Membership Task Force. He was also involved in NCC’s 30 th Anniversary Celebration as a panelist for the round-table event “Celebrating Past Achievements and Establishing a Path Forward.” In his statement of interest, Dr. Hayes wrote that he sees the role of Librarian Representative as an extension of NCC’s overall mission of meeting shared concerns in the field of Japanese Studies and Librarianship and feels “poised to connect with, advocate for, and work alongside the members of the NCC community.” We are excited to welcome Matthew Hayes on board!

We would also like to take this opportunity to thank Steve Witt, NCC’s outgoing Librarian Representative (2019-2022), Director of Global Studies, and Head of the International and Area Studies Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, for all his contributions over the past three years to the NCC Council and for his work as leader of the NCC Fundraising Task Force. We are looking forward to his future involvement with NCC. Thank you, Steve!