Collections Convergence Initiative

As Japanese Studies Librarian Dr. Rebecca Corbett selects and manages print and digital collections in Japanese; and 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.

As Coordinator of the Cassady Lewis Carroll Collection Dr. Corbett provides research services, instruction, and collection management.

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. She is also a member of the Council on East Asian Libraries Committee on Japanese Materials (2020-2023), Librarian Representative on the North American Coordinating Council on Japanese Library Resources (2020-2023) and Member of the Executive Committee on the North American Coordinating Council on Japanese Library Resources (2022-2023).

William Deverell received his undergraduate degree from Stanford University in American Studies with honors and distinction. He received his Ph.D. in American History from Princeton University in 1989. He is Professor of History at the University of Southern California and Director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, which he founded in 2004. He previously taught at the California Institute of Technology and the University of California, San Diego.

In addition to undergraduate and graduate teaching, Professor Deverell writes about the nineteenth and twentieth century American West. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of numerous books exploring a variety of topics and themes. They include The Blackwell Companion to Los Angeles (co-edited with Greg Hise); The Blackwell Companion to California History (co-edited with David Igler); and The Blackwell Companion to the History of the American West. He is the author of Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past and of Railroad Crossing: Californians and the Railroad, 1850-1910. With the historian Tom Sitton, he is the co-editor of Metropolis in the Making: Los Angeles in the 1920s and California Progressivism Revisited. With Greg Hise, he co-authored Eden by Design: The 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angeles Region and co-edited Land of Sunshine: An Environmental History of Metropolitan Los Angeles. He is currently at work on a study of the post-Civil War American West, under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing.

Originally from Germany, Wolf Gruner is a historian and a specialist for the research on the Holocaust and German-Jewish history. Additional areas of research include the comparative history of mass violence and its resistance on a global scale, as well as racial and state discrimination against indigenous populations, especially in Latin America. His most recent book, Parias de la Patria,challenges the myth of the liberation of the indigenous people in the postcolonial 19th-century Republic of Bolivia and was published with Plural Editores, La Paz, Bolivia. Dr. Gruner established and co-directed the USC Dornsife 2020 interdisciplinary research cluster: “Resisting the Path to Genocides” (2010-2014). In 2014, Dr. Gruner became the founding director of the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research.

Joseph Hawkins, Ph.D., currently teaches anthropology and gender studies at the University of Southern California. His anthropological research focuses on homosexuality and identity in the postwar period of Japan. His translation of “A Tour of Gay Town,” from the Yomiuri Shimbun appears in the recent volume Queer Voices Out of Japan, from Rowman and Littlefield.

Professor Hawkins has also completed an ethnographic film about a Japanese Naked Festival. He was previously the President of the Board of Directors of the ONE Archives Foundation and is currently Director of ONE Archives at the USC Libraries.

Andrew Justice holds music degrees from Oregon State University and the University of Oregon, as well as a library science degree from Syracuse University. He began his library career at Cornell University’s Sidney Cox Library of Music and Dance before spending nearly a decade at the University of North Texas Music Library, one of the largest academic music collections in North America. Maintaining an active performing career as a baroque violist, his personal research interests include historical performance practice, teaching research skills to musicians, and the development of sound recording technologies.

Professor Kun is a 2016 MacArthur Fellow and the winner of a 2018 Berlin Prize and a 2006 American Book Award. His research focuses on the arts and politics of cultural connection, with an emphasis on popular music, sound, the cultures of globalization, the US-Mexico border, Los Angeles, and Jewish-American musical history. He also works as a journalist, essayist, and curator. He is director of The Popular Music Project at USC Annenberg’s The Norman Lear Center and co-editor (with Ron Radano) of the book series “Refiguring American Music” for Duke University Press. He co-curates Crossfade Lab, a conversation and performance series that occurs across multiple sites in Phoenix, Arizona.

Elizabeth A. Logan received her undergraduate degree from Stanford University in History with honors, her JD from the UCLA School of Law, and her Ph.D. from the University of Southern California. She serves as the Associate Director of ICW and the Executive Director of the Los Angeles Service Academy (LASA). Her previous work includes positions as an Assistant Editor of Boom: A Journal of California and as a Dornsife Preceptor. Her teaching and work explores the intersections of law, history and culture in the 19th- and early 20th-century United States and American West.

Dr. Susan Luftschein is the Head of Special Collections in the USC Libraries, where she oversees a department that houses rare books, manuscripts, and archives. Since joining the USC Libraries in 2009, she has played a leading role in helping to improve the care of and public access to USC’s unique archival collections. This work has included developing archival workflows, procedures, and training materials; leading archival and digital library projects supported by the National Historic Publications and Records Commission, the National Park Service, and other federal agencies; and guiding the acquisition of culturally significant archival collections for the USC Libraries. Luftschein holds a Ph.D. in art history from the CUNY Graduate Center, an M.A. in art history from Temple University, and an M.L.I.S. from UCLA.

Suzanne Noruschat is Southern California Studies Specialist in Special Collections at University of Southern California Libraries, where she oversees the Regional History Collection.  She is trained as both an archivist and architectural historian, and has had a longstanding interest in the history of Los Angeles, the city from which she hails.  She received the MLIS from the Department of Information Studies at the University of California Los Angeles and, prior to joining USC Libraries, was Architectural Records Archivist in Manuscripts and Archives at Yale University Library.  She received the PhD from the Department of Art History at Emory University, and has taught architectural and art history at both Emory and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Professor Park’s research focus is the literary and cultural history of modern Korea, which she approaches from the varying perspectives of world literature, postcolonial theory, cultural studies, transnational feminism, and Marxism. Her teaching interests include the intellectual and cultural history of modern Korea, gender and sexuality in Korean literature and culture, East Asia in cross-cultural theories, and twentieth-century world literature. She is also the editor and translator of an anthology of modern Korean stories, On the Eve of the Uprising and Other Stories from Colonial Korea (2009), as well as the author of various articles on historiographical and literary issues.

Professor Karen Tongson joined the USC faculty in fall 2005. She received her Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (NYU Press, 2011), and her writing has appeared in numerous scholarly and public venues. She is the co-editor of the Postmillennial Pop book series at NYU Press. Professor Tongson has a forthcoming book with ForEdge Press on Why Karen Carpenter Matters, and has two other books in progress: Normal Television: Critical Essays on Queer Spectatorship after the “New Normalcy,” and Empty Orchestra: Karaoke in Our Time. You can also hear Professor Tongson talk about pop culture, the arts and entertainment on the weekly Pop Rocket Podcast, hosted by comedian Guy Branum.

Michaela Ullmann is the Exile Studies Librarian and Instruction Coordinator for Special Collections at the University of Southern California (USC). Michaela holds an M.A. in Library and Information Science from San José State University, as well as a Magistra Artium degree in Cultural Anthropology, with minors in Classics and Protohistoric Archaeology from the University of Bonn, Germany. Michaela’s research interests are the German-speaking exiles in Los Angeles, a topic she has published and presented on extensively, as well as the development of innovative approaches for integrating primary source and archival literacy into the teaching curriculum.

Stephanie Yi received her Bachelor’s degree from the University of Southern California in Psychology with a double minor in Linguistics and Criminality & Forensics. She then received her Master’s degree from the University of San Francisco in Sport Management. She served as the Administrative Manager at a private educational institution for six years prior to coming to ICW as the Administrative Operations Coordinator. With a background in community relations, administrative management, and customer service, she is looking forward to helping propel the team and program to newer heights.