Cecil Hobbs
American academic
Cecil Hobbs (April 22, 1907 – December 8, 1991) was an American scholar of Southeast Asian history, best known for being the head of the Southern Asia Section of the Orientalia (now Asian) Division of the Library of Congress. He was regarded as a major contributor to scholarship on Asia and the development of South East Asian coverage in American library collections during a career at the Library of Congress spanning 28 years.
Born on April 22, 1907, in Martins Ferry, Ohio, Hobbs graduated with B.A. degree in history from the University of Illinois, where he was a lecturer for two years. In 1933, he was awarded a B.D. degree from the Colgate Rochester Divinity School in New York state. Hobbs's initial contact with Southeast Asian studies came in 1935, when he traveled with his wife Cecile Jackson Hobbs to Burma, where he served under the American Baptist Mission Board as a field administrator and professor at the Pierce Divinity College and the Burma Theological Seminary. He taught in Burmese. With the outbreak of the Second World War, Imperial Japan swept through East and South East Asia, and Hobbs and his wife returned to the United States after the Japanese invasion of Burma in 1942. Hobbs resumed graduate study at Colgate Rochester, receiving both a Th.M. degree and a doctorate of theology.
Hobbs joined the Library of Congress in 1943, specialising on Southeast Asia, and was elevated to the head of the Southern Asian Section in 1958. During his period as the head, he made six field trips to Southeast Asia to acquire publications for the Library.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cecil Hobbs” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.