User:Catachrestic

About

Hello, my real name is Chris DeFay. I am an occasional contributor to the Wikipedia universe and am a strong proponent of the distributed knowledge found herein. My initial contributions have been additions of missing data, editing pre-existing text contributed by other Wikipedians so they better conform to conventional written English. I have also occasionally removed poorly worded or unsubstantiated comments by other users. More recently, I have begun to work more systematically on creating or expanding entries on 20th century Southern California African-American artists.

Catachrestic is a literary term which means "the misuse of language." Catachrestic is also something of an ironic malapropism as I hope the contributions I make to Wikipedia are factually and grammatically correct.

I hold three degrees (BA, MA, Ph.D.) issued from North American universities and consider myself an expert in the following areas:

* Art History 
   * 19th/20th century American and European Art
   * Modern and Contemporary Art
   * Modern Sculpture
   * Art of the 1960s
   * Impressionism
   * artist-engineer and artist-scientist collaboration
   * 20th Century Southern California Art and Artists

In addition to areas in which I am an expert, I believe I am qualified to contribute intelligently in the following areas:

* 19th Century Utopianism and Utopian Movements
* Aesthetics and Aesthetic Theory
* 19th Century European philosophical thought
* 20th Century Southern California History
* pedagogy
* sociology
* public scholarship
* higher education in the United States
* web technology, databases, search technologies

--Catachrestic (talk) 23:50, 24 January 2008 (UTC)