Rebecca Corbett
Research Areas
Rebecca Corbett’s research interests include the history and practice of Japanese tea culture (chanoyu), and early modern Japanese women’s history. In particular, her work has focused on reevaluating the role of women as practitioners and producers of Japanese tea culture historically. Her book Cultivating Femininity: Women and Tea Culture in Edo and Meiji Japan (University of Hawai’i Press, 2018) analyses privately circulated and commercially published texts to show how tea practice for women was understood, articulated, and promoted from the eighteenth through early twentieth centuries. Her current research explores the lives of western women who spent significant periods of time living in Japan in the late 19th and early 20th century as wives, daughters, sisters, or mothers of men who had official postings or business interests in Japan. This includes recovering these women’s voices and experiences as individuals in their own right, and arguing for a reconsideration of their collecting, writing, and legacies. A second, related, project, explores early Western encounters with chanoyu in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Responsibilities
Rebecca Corbett is the Japanese Studies Librarian in the East Asian Library. She also holds an appointment as Senior Lecturer in History in the USC Dornsife Van Hunnick History Department.
As Japanese Studies Librarian Dr. Corbett provides reference and liaison services to support research, teaching, and learning in Japanese Studies. As an historian, Dr. Corbett works particularly closely with faculty and students to build on our strength in the study of premodern history, religion, and culture through the Project for Premodern Japan Studies. She also works with colleagues in Special Collections to manage Japanese rare books housed at USC Libraries and has a particular interest in the history of the book as a material object in East Asia.
Dr. Corbett is an affiliate faculty member of the USC Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions & Culture and works with them to plan and host events of interest to the Japanese Studies community at USC. In 2023-2025 she was Chair of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) Council of Conferences and AAS Board of Directors member.
Previously Dr. Corbett was Co-Head of the East Asian Library (2021-2022), Curator of the Cassady Lewis Carroll Collection in Special Collections (2021-2023), and Director, Special Projects in the Specialized Collections Portfolio (2022-2024). As Director, Special Projects Dr. Corbett supported the use of under-used archival and other primary collections at USC Libraries through fellowships and public programming.
Education
Ph.D., Japanese Studies, The University of Sydney, 2009
B.A. (Hons), Asian Studies, The University of Sydney, 2004
Awards and Fellowships:
Japan Foundation Research Fellowship, Waseda University, 2024.
Japanese Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship, Center for East Asian Studies, Stanford University, 2013-2015
Japan Foundation Doctoral Fellowship, International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken), 2006-2007
Australian Postgraduate Award, The University of Sydney, 2004-2008
Subject Matter Expertise
- East Asian Studies
- History, Asia
- Japanese Studies