About
This is the online home of Amanda L. Watson. I’m an academic librarian, specializing in reference, library instruction, faculty outreach, and collection development in the humanities, with research interests in book history and digital humanities. (I’m also a fiber-arts fiend, an opera fan, and a poetry enthusiast who wishes that “rhapsode” were still a career option.)
Here you can find my personal blog, information about my work experience, my educational background, articles and other pieces I’ve written, courses I’ve taught and instructional materials I’ve prepared, associations I belong to and other professional service, and miscellaneous stuff that doesn’t fit anywhere else.
Elsewhere on the web
- My Twitter feed
- A Tinyletter that I write, about forgotten 19th-century poetry
- My previous online portfolio at Drexel (now very out of date)
About the name of this site
Why “lime tree bower”? It’s from S. T. Coleridge’s poem “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison.” As a graduate student, I named one of the first web pages I built “The Lime Tree Bower” (the curious can still find it at its old home at the University of Michigan). I always thought “limetreebower.net” would make a good domain name.
The header image is a detail from a picture I took in the lime-tree walk in Russell Square in London.
Household Opera, the name of my blog, comes from the fifth poem in James Merrill’s sonnet sequence “Matinees.” The sequence as a whole explores Merrill’s relationship with opera; the fifth poem begins
The fallen cake, the risen price of meat,
Staircase run ten times up and down like scales
(Greek proverb: He who has no brain has feet) —
One’s household opera never palls or fails.
I’ve always particularly liked that juxtaposition of the operatic and the quotidian.