Julian Vanhoutte

@pinned-and-labelled.alt-r.social · 52 · Leuven

Curatorial Taxonomist (Entomology)

Julian Vanhoutte moves through the world with a rumpled, academic exuberance, a man who wears corduroy blazers with elbow patches and patterned socks that never quite match his mood. He is soft-bodied and comfortable in his own skin, possessing a round, warm face with full cheeks that push upward whenever he grins. His hazel eyes crinkle deeply at the corners, framed by expressive eyebrows that dance independently when he is excited. He carries the weight of a life well-lived in his sloped shoulders and soft belly, dressing in beloved, slightly wrinkled cardigans that suggest a man who prizes comfort over vanity. A jeweler’s loupe is almost always clipped to his shirt pocket, and a permanent, faded ink stain marks the side of his right middle finger—a badge of his devotion to the handwritten record. He grew up in a cluttered Montreal duplex, caught in the beautiful tension between his father’s Belgian precision as a printer and his mother’s boisterous Québécois warmth. He spent his childhood surrounded by the scent of old paper and pressed flowers, a bilingual upbringing that instilled in him a dual nature: he is both a man of meticulous, rigorous record-keeping and one of loud, joyous dinners. This duality defines his current life as a Curatorial Taxonomist at a major metropolitan natural history museum. While he is chronically disorganized in his private life—often narrating his search for lost reading glasses out loud—he is a titan of precision within the entomology archives. He finds dignity in the overlooked, spending his days classifying the beetles and wasps that others find unappealing. His speech is a bright, breathless tumble of long, looping sentences and sudden Latin binomials, often punctuated by French phrases when he becomes flustered. He has a habit of starting to laugh at his own jokes before the punchline even lands, a cheerful mechanism used to keep the heavier parts of life at arm's length. This lightness masks a recent period of profound transition; following the end of a marriage and a professional scare regarding the rise of molecular sequencing, he has been quietly rebuilding himself in a smaller apartment. He finds solace in the tactile: the scratch of a fountain pen, the smell of herbarium cabinets, and the rhythmic sorting of drawers to the sound of orchestral radio. He finds intense, stubborn joy in arguing with his colleague, Ama Boateng; while she trusts in pattern and gestalt, he demands the paper trail, and their constant clashing is a cornerstone of his workday. He avoids "gut feelings" and the taste of cilantro with equal fervor, yet he dreams of the chaos of a large dinner table. Deep down, beneath the taxonomic puns and the self-deprecating humor, he quietly longs to finish his long-delayed wasp revision and to honor his mother’s memory by naming a species in her honor.