NCC News: News

Specialist Spotlight: Dr. Ann Marie L. Davis

Through our Specialist Spotlight series we periodically shine a spotlight on the librarians and information specialists of NCC who are often behind the scenes working to support students, faculty, and staff. Whether you’re in the classroom to learn or teach or are conducting research near or far, these hardworking individuals make Japanese Studies possible.

This month we are pleased to feature a Specialist Spotlight on Dr. Ann Marie L. Davis, Associate Professor and Japanese Studies Librarian at The Ohio State University. Davis began her career with a deep interest in history, acquiring a B.A. in History and International Studies at the College of William and Mary (1993), an M.A. in Regional Studies—East Asia from Harvard University (2001), and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Japanese History from the University of California, Los Angeles (2009). Before entering graduate school, she lived in Japan for several years, ultimately working in outreach and communications for the organizing committee of the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympic Games.

While working as a professor East Asian History at Connecticut College, she made the decision to combine her disciplinary expertise with research librarianship, earning a Master’s of Library Science at Southern Connecticut State University in 2015. In 2016, she accepted her current position at The Ohio State University Libraries, bringing her extensive experience to bear on the field of Japan Studies librarianship.

Davis has a robust record of publications on both history and library science, including her monograph Imagining Prostitution in Modern Japan, 1850–1913 (2019), “Faculty–library Collaborations in Digital History: A Case Study of the Travel Journal of Cornelius B. Gold” (2018), and “The Unprecedented Views of Wada Yoshiko: Reconfiguring Pleasure Work in Yūjo Monogatari (1913). 和田芳子の破天荒の視点:『遊女物語』の売春” (2014). As a faculty librarian, she offers one-shot classes, outreach courses to K-12 educators, graduate-level seminars, as well as critical research and (now rarely taught) bibliographic methods in Japanese Studies. In addition, she works closely with faculty, artists, and other Japan specialists to provide expertise on manga studies, Japan and the Japanese diaspora, and digital scholarship. As a part of her digital humanities initiatives, Davis has created a grant-funded Scalar exhibit with teaching modules, Atomic Gameboard 原子双六, on a 1949 Japanese fold-out gameboard print (sugoroku) on physics and atomic technology, and The Manga Picture Scrolls of the 53 Stations of the Tōkaidō, an interactive StoryMap exhibit of two 1921 watercolor handscrolls handscrolls of the famous Tōkaidō travel route.

Despite her busy schedule, Davis also finds time to volunteer with the local APIDA community in Ohio to promote Asian American history. Collaborating with Asian and Asian American educators, scholars, and community leaders, she is working to develop an open-access, collaborative digital repository of primary sources on the formation and transformation of Asian communities in Ohio. As one of the original members of Filipino American National History Society (FANHS) of Ohio, she has contributed to the collection of local oral histories and worked with OSU students to curate library displays on Fil-Am history and APIDA communities in central Ohio. Such efforts aim to shine a light on lesser-known AAPI experiences and contributions in the Midwest and broaden our knowledge of US history beyond its coastal locales.

Davis has been an active member of NCC for many years, including serving as a member of the Cooperative Collection Development Working Group since 2017. She also served on the Digital Resource Committee (presently on hiatus) from 2019 to 2022, collaborating on the development of the Notable Japanese Collections Dashboard, a website and ongoing project that aims to map all print and digital materials, including unprocessed or partially processed collections, in North America. She has also written for NCC’s Japanese Studies Spotlight series on The Fumio Fujiki and Tokio Tobita Collection of The Ohio State University Libraries. We hope for many more years of fruitful collaboration at NCC!