NCC News: News

Specialist Spotlight: Rebecca Corbett

Through our Specialist Spotlight series we periodically shine a spotlight on librarians and information specialists 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.

For our first Specialist Spotlight of the month we are highlighting the career of Dr. Rebecca Corbett, the Director of Special Projects and Japanese Studies Librarian at the University of Southern California Libraries. A historian of tea culture and digital resources enthusiast, Corbett’s contributions to Japan Studies reach far beyond USC or NCC.

Corbett began her academic path as a B.A. in Asian Studies at the University Sydney (2004), where she would subsequently seek a Ph.D. in Japanese Studies (2009) focused on the role of women in the history of tea during the Edo and Meiji periods. After spending two years adjuncting in Australian and North American institutions, she decided to explore other ways to contribute to the field where she could leverage her research expertise outside of the volatile academic tenure track circuit. Having considered librarianship throughout her academic career, Corbett decided to get practical experience (and steady employment), so she spent half a year at a military history library in cataloging, after which she obtained an entry-level position at the National Library of Australia’s Oral History & Folklore department. This process was easier said than done–many places considered her over or underqualified for these positions because of PhD and lack of MLIS–but Corbett found the work challenging and rewarding, allowing her to use her research skills to assist other scholars while navigating complex archival and information services systems. She then moved to a higher level position at the National Archives of Australia, working in reference assisting the public, journalists, and academics to access government records.

Nevertheless, Corbett longed to return to Japanese Studies; she was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University in 2013, where she worked with Dr. Regan Murphy Kao and cultivated her existing skill sets and arrived at the decision to become an academic Japanese Studies Librarian. In 2016 she began work as the Japanese Studies Librarian at the University of Southern California’s East Asian Library and in 2023 she was also appointed to Director of Special Projects, a position that allows her to facilitate the use of special collections and archives across USC Libraries’ Specialized Collections portfolio that might otherwise receive little attention. Having a courtesy appointment in History and an affiliation with USC’s Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions & Culture, Corbett is also able to contribute to research and teaching within the USC community.

Corbett’s monograph, Cultivating Femininity: Women and Tea Culture in Edo and Meiji Japan (University of Hawai’i Press, 2018), explores the intersections of Japanese tea culture, practice, history, and gender. In addition to publishing articles on women in tea and the practice of tea more generally, she is also presently working on a project related to Western encounters with Japanese tea in the nineteenth century. Her outreach efforts align with her research interests in tea culture, for example, she has been the Faculty Advisor to the USC Chanoyu Tea Club since its inception in 2018. As an Urasenke tea practitioner with decades of experience, as well as an academic specialist in the history of Japanese tea culture, Corbett regularly offers tea demonstrations and lectures for classes at USC, other schools and public institutions such as Occidental College, the USC Pacific Asia Museum, and the Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Florida. Her Japanese tea culture related activities have seen her interviewed on KTLA local morning news in LA and she was even profiled by the Japanese women’s magazine Precious in their May, 2018 issue!

We have greatly benefited from Corbett’s combined scholarly and information science expertise during her tenure as our Librarian Representative (2020 to 2023) and as an Executive Committee member from 2022 to 2023. She has also contributed to NCC’s Japanese Studies Spotlight series with a fascinating exploration of the Cassady Lewis Carroll Collection at USC in “Encountering Alice in Japan” and received our “Most Collaborative” Grand Prize in 2021 Comprehensive Digitization and Discoverability Program (CDDP) Video competition for “Unpinning History: A Digital Exhibit from USC Libraries.” She is now serving as a member of the Executive Committee and Board of Directors of the Association for Asian Studies as Chair of the Council of Conferences (2023-2025). We look forward to her forthcoming contributions to the field!