Dr. Charles Edward Lincoln, III, is an archaeologist whose research has covered topics from Spanish Colonialism (e.g. Pangs, Season IV) to the myth and rituals of Osiris (on which Willow should have a little bit more research herself....start of Season VI) to his main specialty in Maya/Mesoamerican archaeology and mythology (which made a brief if somewhat disappointing appearance in an episode of Angel last year....).
His Ph.D. (Ethnicity and Social Organization at Chichen Itza, Yucatan, Mexico, Harvard [Anthropology/Peabody Museum] 1990) had as its theoretical focus the comparative mythology of power relationships and kingship---building on the century or so of comparative mythology that all started with Frazer's The Golden Bough. It is in revisiting this topic (divine kingship and the relationship of rulership and murder/sacrifice) that he comes to the Buffy Slayage Conference.

Although he has been intrigued by vampires and the occult ever since his college days at Tulane in the natural (U.S.) home of such things in New Orleans, Louisiana, and his graduate years haunting ancient Maya tombs, temples, and abandonned churches and haciendas in Yucatan, Charles Lincoln started watching Buffy during the first season and it thereafter became a life-altering obsession.

Lincoln was married at the time to a woman who physically and even vocally resembled Buffy but acted more like a cross between Anyanka and Holly. He thinks, in retrospect, that he would have been better off with (at least the high school version) of Willow, and having made this mistake he feels eternally bound to Xander.

Charles is working, albeit fitfully, on a book-length comparison of mythology/social structure embodied in Buffy with that of the operas of Richard Wagner, on the one hand, and the Bible on the other---under the tentative title of Buffy, Bayreuth, and the Bible: the social and political implications of alternative structures in love, death, and redemption.

The triad may seem odd, but Charles maintains that the Bible is (almost) undisputably the greatest book in the history of the world, Wagner is (almost) undisputably the greatest composer in the history of the world, and Buffy is (absolutely) undisputably the greatest TV show/series ever made. Lincoln confesses this BBB is just the latest of a long series of unfinished manuscripts which he swears he'll finish someday....in this life or the next....or the next.

He lives in Lago Vista, in the Hill Country northwest of Austin, Texas, surrounded by creatures of the night (Genus Procyon lotor L.) who are sometimes mistaken for HSTs in the lingo of The Initiative. Because Charles Lincoln's "independent" academic pursuits pay about as much as Vampire Slayage, without any of the glamourous friends/enemies, and adjunct teaching at the local community college likewise pays about as well as Buffy's several waitressing jobs (well, almost as well, anyhow), he is forced, from time-to-time to accept part-time employment at one of the many Lone Star equivalents/branches of Wolfram & Hart. He is well aware of the peril this poses to his immortal soul, but what did the Mayor say to Spike about a soul being as "slippery as a greased weasel?"