I offer a variety of services, including different types of editing for article- and book-length manuscripts, indexes for academic and nonfiction books, as well as fact-checking and sensitivity readings for fiction. I do not publicize my editing clients, so please contact me directly if you are looking for references.

A Note on AI: All of my editing and indexing is done by one human with a PhD. I have never used, nor do I ever intend to use, generative AI. If you are an author using it, I urge you to find another editor.

Services I Provide

Developmental Editing: Includes detailed comments focusing on argument, structure, sources. Usually occurs early on, after the manuscript is complete, either before or after peer review, depending on the author’s preference.

Line Editing: Sentence-level changes for style, flow, and syntax. Heavier line edits can include substantial cuts to word count and restructuring of paragraphs. Should occur after developmental edits are complete.

Copyediting: Spelling, grammar, punctuation, and consistency/standardization. Should occur after all major revisions are complete.

Formatting: Standardizing a manuscript within a specific house style.

Citations: Standardizing notes and bibliography within a specific house style. Heavier citation edits can include checking references and quotations for accuracy.

Proofreading: Corrections made to page proofs.

Indexing

For Fiction Authors:

I am an experienced beta-reader for both short-form and long-form fiction. I read for plot, characterization, internal logic, and setting, as well as the kind of line and copy editing described above for nonfiction. I also fact-check historical fiction and historically-rooted speculative fiction. For my areas of content expertise, see my teaching and publication pages.

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Experience

I have worked as an editor both formally and informally since I was a graduate student. My first editing job was in 2005, proofreading and checking references for Anna A. Grotans’ monograph Reading in Medieval St. Gall (Cambridge UP, 2006). I edited and proofread article drafts, thesis chapters, and several complete theses for English and Modern Languages between 2006 and 2010. My first formal edited collection, Space and Place in Children’s Literature, 1789 to the Present (Ashgate, 2015) was a collaboration with Maria Sachiko Cecire (Bard College), Malini Roy, and Hannah Field (University of Sussex) and developed out of a conference we organized in Oxford in 2009.

Since then, I have edited or co-edited three other collections (details below), and served as a peer reviewer (anonymously and otherwise) for Bloomsbury, Routledge, Palgrave Macmillan, Cambridge University Press, and Oxford University Press, working with individual articles as well as full-length manuscripts. I also completed dramaturgical editing of Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part II for the late and much lamented Brave Spirits Theatre in Alexandria, VA, in preparation for their 2020 repertory production of all eight of Shakespeare’s history plays. Unfortunately, this production was cancelled due to COVID-19, but BST have since released an audio recording of the full cycle, available on YouTube, Spotify, and other podcasting apps.

Kavita is an incredibly smart, attentive, and imaginative reader. She proofread Scripts of Blackness with a carefulness that saved me much embarrassment, and she compiled a fabulous index for this really long and dense book, helping me draw original paths through it while paying close attention to the level of granularity that I wanted. Kavita delivered on time, helping me meet my editorial deadlines at every turn, and I could not be any more grateful to her! I recommend her to anyone who asks me for a good indexer and reader—especially scholars working in Premodern Critical Race Studies, because she really has her finger on the pulse of that field. Thank you, Kavita!

— Noémie Ndiaye (University of Chicago)

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Edited Collections

The Palgrave Handbook of Shakespeare’s Queens was published in July 2018. Co-edited with Valerie Schutte, this 25-chapter collection ranges from broad-based studies of queenship and stagecraft in Shakespeare’s plays to analyses of individual queens, both historical and fictional, as characters. Our contributors include scholars from a variety of fields–history, literature, theatre, and fine arts–and from across the world. Update (07.2020): Winner of the 2020 Royal Studies Journal Book Prize!

The collection offers a careful and thorough insight into the early modern perceptions and representations of queenship as well as our own contemporary expectations and projections. Its vast gallery of protagonists or secondary roles, which causes an interesting negotiation between the historical fact and the literary or theatrical interpretation, provides much food for thought about early modern politics or notions of power, visibility and influence, but also about universal values such as female solidarity, loyalty, resistance, or even very topical issues like cultural mixing.

Royal Studies Journal (2020)

Becoming: Essays on NBC’s Hannibal was published in June 2019 by Syracuse University Press. This collection, co-edited with EJ Nielsen, features thirteen chapters and an interview with one of the series’ screenwriters, Nick Antosca. The chapters offer readings of the NBC series (2012-2015) from a truly interdisciplinary perspective, including psychology, criminology, literature, film studies, food studies, and fan studies.

Even if you are not a fan of the show, Hannibal is used by contributors as a step into a range of concerns; and will leave you hungry for more!

Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television (2020)

Fan Phenomena: Game of Thrones was published in June 2017, coinciding with the penultimate season of HBO’s Game of Thrones. Also an interdisciplinary collection, rooted in fan and reception studies, it offers a striking snapshot of what this global fan phenomenon looked like at its height, prior to its final season.

Mudan Finn assumed the challenge of taking a pop culture icon and transforming it into a topic worthy of scholarly discourse. Fan Phenomena: Game of Thrones is no doubt a success, and an important one, proving that popular culture is ripe for study in academia.

Fashion, Style, and Culture (2019)