You’ve poured your life, labor, love, and ideals into your research. Now it’s time to get it out into the world. I can help.

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onesuch Editing specializes in developmental and substantive author editing for multiliterate scholars, researchers, and postdocs in the narrative social sciences and humanities. I help academic authors develop and improve their book manuscripts and shorter pieces for submission to a publisher, acquisitions or series editor, granting agency, or prospective employer. I work with multiliterate writers whose texts require an extra level of attention to bridging multiple linguistic and writing cultures and communities.

As a developmental and substantive author’s editor, my goal is for your ideas and ideals to hit their mark. I help by working with you in your camp, so to speak, on the side of your critical aims. I understand that you are engaging critically and complexly with your research data on the one hand and the theoretical insights of your field on the other. My job is to help you forge creative links between your research aims and your target audience’s literary needs and expectations.

I genuinely want your colleagues to be excited about your work and what it can contribute to their own. I want publishers to be jockeying to add it to their roster of forthcoming releases. I want practitioners, policymakers, and the public to be persuaded by it. That’s why I do this work—because I care about the effect research has on the world; what it can do for our understandings and our lives.

But what do I do, really?

I look at how your manuscript works as a text: how it hangs together as a unit of discourse; how its arguments chart a coherent narrative; how it leverages theory, sources, and evidence; how it functions within your discipline’s literary genre; how well-suited it is to your target readership; how persuasively and musically it reads; how faithfully it articulates your authorial stance on your subject.

In short, I guide you through the full gamut of discursive choices—from voice and style to argument staging and narrative build—that will bring your unique stance and theoretical contribution into sharp relief.

Developmental assessments and comments cover argument coherence and staging, evidence-theory pairs, narrative build, theoretical contribution, and authorial voice, stance, and style.

Substantive line edits cover three areas: structural editing for organization and conceptual cohesion; stylistic editing for lexical and thematic cohesion and flow; and copy editing for accuracy, consistency, and grammar. While the edit conforms to publisher style, I do not perform final copy edits at the stage just before typesetting; I intervene at the earlier submission stage when big-picture issues need the most attention.

For book manuscripts, I deliver a substantive line edit, developmental and substantive comments in the Word document, a separate written developmental assessment, and a style sheet. The turnaround time for this deep work is generally two months, depending on manuscript length and needs: shorter manuscripts intervened in at a more honed stage take less time, longer and more complicated manuscripts take more. I have a limited number of book editing slots per year, so it is best to contact me well in advance to get on my schedule.

For shorter pieces, including articles, chapters, grant proposals, and book proposal packages (book proposal + 1–2 chapters), I deliver a substantive line edit with developmental and substantive comments in the Word document, plus a style sheet. Turnaround time depends on manuscript length and needs. Plan for around 2 weeks per 10,000–12,000 words. Large grant proposals (for example, EU Horizon Europe Research and Innovation grants) take longer and are charged on a per project basis.

I also offer comprehensive reference editing in both author-date and notes-bibliography systems, including cross-checking, reference-checking, and formatting according to publisher style.

I edit in Microsoft Word using the Track Changes and marginal Comments features so that you receive extensive feedback, commentary, and modelling. Comment topics include everything from argument staging missteps and inconsistent terminology to contradictory claims and suggestions for syntactic changes. If something isn’t working, I’ll contact you and ask you to clarify or recast. With some clients and projects (e.g., book manuscripts that need ground-up developmental work or large grant proposals with multiple moving parts), the work can take on a back-and-forth dialogic character.

Past Work

I have edited monographs, collected volumes, and chapters published at university and academic trade presses: Stanford, Duke, California, Cornell, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Syracuse, Springer, ICI Berlin, Basic Books/John Murray Press. I have also edited article-length manuscripts published in high-ranking journals: American Ethnologist; Anthropological Theory; British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies; Comparative Sociology; Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East; Current Anthropology; Ethnic and Racial Studies; Ethnicities; Journal of Ethnic & Migration Studies; Journal of Refugee Studies; Memory Studies; Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism; Public Culture; Punishment & Society; Social Anthropology.

Books and articles I have edited have been nominated and shortlisted for and have won prestigious prizes and honorable mentions in their fields: American Anthropological Association Middle East Section Book Award; Association for Political and Legal Anthropology Book Prize in Critical Anthropology; Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa Best Paper Prize; Council for European Studies Gender and Sexuality Research Network Best Article Prize; Middle East Studies Association Fatima Mernissi Book Award; Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association M. Fuad Köprülü Book Prize; Society for Humanistic Anthropology Victor Tuner Prize in Anthropology; Society for Medical Anthropology New Millennium Book Award; Wolfson History Prize.

I have worked with scholars from across a range of disciplines, including anthropology, history, sociology, political science, political theory, gender studies, cultural studies, art history, peace studies, geography, comparative religion.

About Me

I have an MPhil from the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University, an MA from the Department of History at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, and an MA from the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization at the University of Washington-Seattle. I hold a certificate in copy editing from the University of California-San Diego and have completed training at the University of Chicago in developmental editing. Because disability parenting called my name, I completed Florida Institute of Technology’s BACB-approved course sequence in Applied Behavior Analysis with an emphasis on verbal behavior.

I have worked in editing, writing, and research; in grants writing, development, contracting, management, review, and reporting; and in programs designed to improve the lives of those with complex developmental disabilities. I have taught English as a foreign language to multilanguage speakers and augmentative and alternative communication strategies to nonverbal communicators. I work regularly with texts featuring Turkish, French, Dutch, and German, have expertise in several Turkic languages, and have background comparative knowledge of Persian, Semitic, and Slavic language groups. My area expertise covers Central Asia, the Caucasus, Anatolia, the Balkans, the Middle East, and Europe.

An enthusiast of the printed word, cross-cultural knowledge production, and multimodal communication, I am also a disability parent who spends part of her life learning how to be a more effective disability ally. The Chicago Manual of Style has been my favorite style guide for over three and a half decades. I live in Leiden, Netherlands.

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