An (Art) Historical Journey

I’ve always been fascinated by early modern Europe - its pageantry and poetry, technology and material culture, utterly gorgeous artistic creations, and changing ideas about the nature of existence that underpin our worldview up to the modern day. In 2003 I started a PhD program at Brown University in the History of Art and Architecture to explore the roles that paintings, sculptures, prints, and buildings played in religious conflicts in the Low Countries. I moved to Antwerp, Belgium, in 2006 with Fulbright and Belgian American Educational Foundation grants to work on my dissertation on the Court Beguinages in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and I ended up returning to the continent at the end of my PhD: doing a postdoc at the University of Bern in Switzerland, followed by fellowships from the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, and then joining the faculty of the University of Utrecht in 2017. In the fall of 2022 I left my Associate Professor post there to pursue new opportunities, including building this scholarly editing business.

For much of my career my closest colleagues have been non-native English speakers, and I naturally stepped into the role of translator, editor, and reviewer for their anglophone work. During my postdoc at Bern this was an official part of my job; for example I helped to draft, partly translated (from German), and edited the department’s application for a Swiss National Science Foundation grant (“The Interior: Art, Space, and Performance”), which was funded to the tune of 1.2 million francs, and I worked in a similar capacity with the many scholars involved in Prof. Dr. Christine Göttler’s and Prof. Dr. Sven Dupré’s Marie Curie European Research Council project on Emmanuel Ximenez. More recently I have headed my own projects: the Journal of Early Modern History 2018 special issue “Perspectives On Women’s Religious Activities, which I co-organized, and my co-edited 2019 volume Women and Gender in the Early Modern Low Countries, which you can read open-access at Brill. I have also worked as a peer reviewer for several journals, and in between fellowships I have done freelance editing for several books and articles in English by non-native speakers.

I have found this kind of work - whether the intervention is minor copy-editing, or deeper work on content, structure, and style - incredibly rewarding. For most scholars the research phase, with all its hours of data gathering and hard-won insights, constitutes a very different kind of labor than the writing, when we have to figure out how to shape that knowledge into a linear text that communicates clearly to others the value of our work. The latter task always benefits from outside eyes and feedback, and I find it deeply satisfying to help researchers through that process.

As an established scholar of both early modern art and architecture and women’s history (you can check out my academia.edu page), I’m excited to work with academics in those fields. If your research deals with the Low Countries I can offer especially in-depth feedback. My background also makes me uniquely positioned to assist academics who research, collaborate, and publish across international borders: I have both extensive experience working with non-native English speakers, and a deep understanding of the differences in funding mechanisms, professional structures, and the unspoken cultural and ideological value systems that determine how a given scholarly project is received in Europe vs. North America. If you think my skills could be of use to you in framing your research and bringing your projects to fruition, please don’t hesitate to get in touch!