Welcome! I’m Caitlin, I’m from Chicago, and I like to write. A lot. Into the void, or wherever. (I love the idea of someone listening, though.) Usually typed, because my wrists hurt. And I type like an avalanche, although I’m told I don’t use quite the right fingers.
By profession and lineage I am an academic librarian (the lineage part is more the librarian thing—my grandparents were both librarians, and Wisconsin’s student choice award just so happens to be named for my grandmother, who casts a very long shadow for a not very big woman). I focused on diverse users and public services in library school, back in the day when the University of Illinois had a Graduate School of Library and Information Science, not an Information School.
Before my library degree I completed a Master’s of Spanish (back when the department was Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese); there I emphasized the literature of the very dead, my specialty, preferring colonial Latin America and Siglo de Oro/Medieval Iberian literature. My area was gender, particularly constructions of masculinity. my (theoretical) positioning is postcolonial, particularly emphasizing and built around this book and the essays therein. I love history and old literature; I read it for fun, retreating to Shakespeare and Sor Juana and the jarchas when my day is particularly bad. And I’m incredibly glad I don’t live back then.
I’ve also got a background in art history, particularly architecture—civic and commercial, mostly, although to get more specific, it’s really post-Fire Chicago. As a child I shuttled between a laboratory and a random assortment of backstages; I snuck into university buildings and spied on grad students. I marched in peace demonstrations and walked picket lines—all starting before I could walk on my own. Oh, and technically my misfiring brain and I fall into the realm of neurodiversity: I’m severely dyslexic. No paperwork: it was hella expensive. Can’t say I recommend it, but I mostly get by.
This site started out as a bit of a school project (the title’s from my friends, who say it’s what I am); those original pieces are art and history combined: Timelining Lives, the landing page for a number of different eras in the arts, is a springboard to pages such as Baroque and Impressionism, with links to interactive arts-based timelines. I’m very proud of that particular grad school project, and who knows, maybe it will even be useful (or at least entertaining!) for you.
Essentially a Nerd 