I'm not Peter Graves, but this is Biography

Biographies generally are a disease of English literature
-- Mary Evans Cross
(George Eliot)

As you know by now, my name is Christine Malcom. I was born at Little Company of Mary Hospital and raised on the southwest side of Chicago, a hop skip and a jump from Midway Airport. I have two older sisters, an older brother and a younger brother. I also have two nieces and four nephews courtesy of my sisters and sister-in-law. Pictures are soon to follow. Yes, my family is Catholic, why do you ask? They're so Catholic, in fact, that I attended grammar school at St. Mary Star of the Sea.

I then spent 4 years at Maria High School, which has absolutely no presence on the web. This isn't terribly surprising since they did their registration on key punch cards when I was there. It's located, however, right next to Marquette Park where the neonazi demonstration in the Blues Brothers took place. It was the site of a real neonazi demonstration in 1978. Incidentally, my father is a retired Chicago policeman.

Actually, my dad being a policeman isn't at all incidental. I won a University of Chicago Police/Fire scholarship which paid the rather copious amount of tuition demanded by the College. I lived in Snell Hall the last year it was single sex, and I was one of the first women to live in Hitchcock Hall (pictured at the left) and stayed there for 3 years. As an undergrad, I worked with Shoestring Theatre (which is, unfortunately, now defunct) and did 2 shows with University Theater. I also participated in the U of C Scavenger hunt the for two of the years when Hitchcock won first place. Here's a copy of a (now, not terribly recent) list.

One of the most important parts of my undergraduate career was attending field school at the Center for American Archaeology.In many ways, it was the toughest 9 weeks I've ever spent since we were sandwiched in between the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers in 1993, the year the entire midwest flooded. On the other hand, I knew that if I could love archaeology under those conditions, I could love it anywhere. Nonetheless, I don't think that the fact that I have chosen to work in the desert is entirely coincidental.

As for the present, I have three jobs in addition to my schooling. I'm an editorial assistant for a journal called Economic Development and Cultural Change. I also keep the professional development program at SSA from drowning in the information age. Last but certainly not least, I'm a teaching assistant for the Human Morphology course in the Pritzker School of Medicine . The most important part of my life right now, though, is my research on the southern coast of Peru, which you can read more about on my academics page.

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