Overview
I have many years' experience working freelance as a copy-editor and proofreader for academic publishers (Oxford University Press; Princeton University Press; Boydell & Brewer) on mainly scholarly but also trade publications in the humanities and social sciences (history and memory studies, politics and current affairs, literary studies, philosophy, language and linguistics: see my portfolio below). I'm an ex-academic writing tutor at the universities of Cambridge and Essex, and continue to work with non-native English-speaking writer clients – historians especially welcome! – to revise and perfect their print or online texts in English ('anglicisation'). I also translate from Italian to English, again with a special but not exclusive interest in history.I'll gladly respond to enquiries regarding work on academic or non-academic texts related to my areas of knowledge or interest, and provide a free estimate of likely cost based on a sample and market rates. Ideally, texts for copy-editing should be in Word, but other formats including hard copy may also be possible.
Services
Non-Fiction
History
Humanities & Social Sciences
Political Science & Current Affairs
Languages
English (UK)
English (US)
Certifications
- Society for Editors and Proofreaders 'CE 3: Copy-editing Progress', passed May 2017
Work experience
Self-employed
May, 2017 —
Present
I began working as a freelance academic proofreader in 2008, after 25 years in ELT (English language teaching) and while employed as a cross-disciplinary university academic writing tutor. I became a copy-editor in 2016, working mainly for academic publishers, and continue also to work with non-anglophone academics to prepare their texts (by translation or revision) in English for professional purposes and print or online publication.
In 2017, I undertook further training in advanced copy-editing through the Society for Editors and Proofreaders, and set up my own company offering editorial and translation services.
Portfolio
This book offers an innovative and provocative analysis of the much-studied Cuban Revolution by reminding us that Fidel Castro's was actually the second of the island's twentieth-century revolutions. By bringing 1959 into critical communication with the revolu... read more
Inquisition against heresy in Italy was a partnership between the papal inquisitor, usually a Dominican or Franciscan friar, the local bishop and the civic authority; and it is generally considered that the inquisitor was the leading figure, from the mid thirt... read more
A bloody episode that epitomised the political dilemmas of the eighteenth centuryIn 1798, members of the United Irishmen were massacred by the British amid the crumbling walls of a half-built town near Waterford in Ireland. Many of the Irish were republicans i... read more
This volume, a tribute to Mark Goldie, traces the evolution of Whig and Tory, Puritan and Anglican ideas across a tumultuous period of British history, from the mid-seventeenth century through to the Age of Enlightenment. Mark Goldie, Fellow of Churchill Colle... read more
A revealing look at how today’s bureaucrats are finding their public voice in the era of 24-hour mediaOnce relegated to the anonymous back rooms of democratic debate, our bureaucratic leaders are increasingly having to govern under the scrutiny of a 24-hour ne... read more
An exploration of how the Greeks reacted to and interacted with India from the third to first centuries BCEWhen the Greeks and Macedonians in Alexander’s army reached India in 326 BCE, they entered a new and strange world. They knew a few legends and travelers... read more
The Conservative Party is the least investigated and understood of British political parties, despite its long record of success. Using an original approach and an unparalleled range of sources, Stuart Ball analyses the nature and working of the Conservative P... read more
The book presents new and stimulating approaches to the study of language evolution and considers their implications for future research. Leading scholars from linguistics, primatology, anthroplogy, and cognitive science consider how language evolution can be ... read more
This book considers linguistic and mental representations of time. Prominent linguists and philosophers from all over the world examine and report on recent work on the representation of temporal reference; the interaction of the temporal information from tens... read more
The popular story of Churchill's war-time rhetoric is a simple one: the British people were energized and inspired by his speeches, which were almost universally admired and played an important role in the ultimate victory over Nazi Germany. Richard Toye now r... read more
Structuring Sense explores the difference between words however defined and structures however constructed. It sets out to demonstrate over three volumes that the explanation of linguistic competence should be shifted from lexical entry to syntactic structure,... read more
This book looks at how the human brain got the capacity for language and how language then evolved. Its four parts are concerned with different views on the emergence of language, with what language is, how it evolved in the human brain, and finally how this p... read more
Until relatively recently, the connection between British imperial history and the history of early America was taken for granted. In recent times, however, early American historiography has begun to suffer from a loss of coherent definition as competing manif... read more
This book explores the uses of adjectives in different constructions, and of the problems that arise in their analysis, both in terms of syntactic theory and philosophy of grammar. Professor Matthews also examines a variety of other issues relating to individu... read more
Sir Thomas Elyot's Latin-English dictionary, published in 1538, became the leading work of its kind in England. In this book Gabriele Stein describes this pioneering work, exploring its inner structure and workings, its impact on contemporary scholarship, and ... read more
From the years leading up to the First World War to the aftermath of the Second, Europe experienced an era of genocide. As well as the Holocaust, this period also witnessed the Armenian genocide in 1915, mass killings in Bolshevik and Stalinist Russia, and a h... read more
From the years leading up to the First World War to the aftermath of the Second, Europe experienced an era of genocide. As well as the Holocaust, this period also witnessed the Armenian genocide in 1915, mass killings in Bolshevik and Stalinist Russia, and a h... read more
A War of Peoples, 1914-1919 provides a new perspective on the First World War, offering a concise narrative of the war from the first military actions in July 1914 until the signing of the peace treaty by Germany in July 1919. Adrian Gregory considers the sour... read more
Classical Philosophy is the first of a series of books in which Peter Adamson aims ultimately to present a complete history of philosophy, more thoroughly but also more enjoyably than ever before. In short, lively chapters, based on the popular History of Phil... read more
This book examines diachronic change and diversity in the morphosyntax of Romance varieties spoken in Italy. These varieties offer an especially fertile terrain for research into language change, because of both the richness of dialectal variation and the leng... read more
This book examines the historical development of discourse and pragmatic markers across the Romance languages. These markers serve to indicate the organization of the discourse, the speaker's relationship with the interlocutor, and the speaker's stance with re... read more
This book investigates the changes that affected vowel length during the development of Latin into the Romance languages and dialects. In Latin, vowel length was contrastive (e.g. pila 'ball' vs. pila 'pile', like English bit vs. beat), but no modern Romance l... read more
The secular clergy - priests and other clerics outside of monastic orders - were among the most influential and powerful groups in European society during the central Middle Ages. The secular clergy got their title from the Latin word for world, saeculum, and ... read more
The later twelfth and thirteenth centuries were a pivotal period for the development of European government and governance. During this period a mentality took hold which trusted to procedures of accountability as a means of controlling officers' conduct. The ... read more
This book brings together, in a novel way, an account of the structure of time with an account of our language and thought about time. Joshua Mozersky argues that it is possible to reconcile the human experience of time, which is centred on the present, with t... read more
This book seeks to bring together the pragmatic theory of 'meaning as use' with the traditional semantic approach that considers meaning in terms of truth conditions. Daniel Gutzmann adopts core ideas by the philosopher David Kaplan in assuming that the meanin... read more
Diplomacy has never been a politically-neutral research field, even when it was confined to merely reconstructing the backgrounds of wars and revolutions. In the nineteenth century, diplomacy was integral to the grand narrative of the building of the modern 'n... read more
Was Petrarch French? This book explores the various answers to that bold question offered by French readers and translators of Petrarch working in a period of less well-known but equally rich Petrarchism: the nineteenth century. It considers both translations ... read more
The prose Brut chronicle was the most popular vernacular work of the late Middle Ages in England, setting a standard for vernacular historical writing well into the age of print, but until recently it has attracted little scholarly attention. This book combine... read more
This book provides the first comprehensive overview of the syntax of old Romanian written in English and targeted at a non-Romanian readership. It draws on an extensive new corpus analysis of the period between the beginning of the sixteenth century, the date ... read more
This book examines historical changes in the grammar of the Indo-Aryan languages from the period of their earliest attestations in Vedic Sanskrit (around 1000 bc) to contemporary Hindi. Uta Reinohl focuses specifically on the rise of configurational structure ... read more
This study provides a new interpretation of how political authority was conceived and transmitted in the Early Mongol Empire (1227-1259) and its successor state in the Middle East, the Ikhanate (1258-1335). Authority within the Mongol Empire was intimately tie... read more
The stigmatization as 'bastards' of children born outside of wedlock is commonly thought to have emerged early in Medieval European history. Christian ideas about legitimate marriage, it is assumed, set the standard for legitimate birth. Children born to anyth... read more
The Russian Revolution of 1917 transformed the face of the Russian empire, politically, economically, socially, and culturally, and also profoundly affected the course of world history for the rest of the twentieth century. Now, to mark the centenary of this e... read more
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.This book explores a key issue in ... read more
This book provides thorough descriptive and theory-neutral coverage of the full range of phonological phenomena of Chichewa, a Malawian Bantu language. Bantu languages have played and continue to play an important role as a source of data illustrating core pho... read more
Wylie Breckenridge offers a fresh understanding of the character of visual experience by deploying the methods of semantics. He develops a theory of what we mean by the 'look' sentences that we use to describe the character of our visual experiences, and on th... read more
A possible direct link between the two greatest literary collections of the fourteenth century, Boccaccio's Decameron and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, has long tantalized readers because these works share many stories, which are, moreover, placed in similar fra... read more
The medieval figure of Merlin is intriguing, enigmatic, and riddled with contradictions. Half human, half devil, he possesses a supernatural knowledge that allows him to prophesy the future. This book examines the reinterpretation of Merlin's character in Fren... read more
The topics treated in this volume include a new look at the Canterbury primacy debate featuring the relics of St Ouen, an analysis of natura and divinitas in twelfth-century philosophical texts, and an examination of the Norman presence in North Africa. There ... read more
Between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, the rise of international trade, the growth of towns and cities, and the politics of diplomacy all helped to foster productive and far-reaching connections and cultural interactions between Britain and Italy; equ... read more
Sweden's connections to and relationships with the European and wider world is a field of study attracting considerable scholarly attention. The essays here, from archaeologists and historians, offer a new perspective on early modern Sweden as deeply affected ... read more
The twenty-first century has witnessed the re-emergence of various kinds of literary formalism, and one project that characterizes most of these diverse formalisms is the effort to distinguish what is precisely literary about their objects of study. The presum... read more
This special edition of the Journal aims to respond to the lively debate in recent years as to whether medieval military history was characterized by particular types of strategy, be it Grand, Vegetian or Battle-Seeking. It brings together many of the pre-emin... read more
From the Gregorian reforms to the Protestant Reformation, heresies and heretics helped shape the religious, political and institutional structures of medieval Europe. Within this larger history of religious ferment, the late medieval period presents a particul... read more
This book explores language variation and change from the perspective of generative syntax, based on a case study of relative clauses in contemporary European Portuguese and earlier stages of Portuguese. Adriana Cardoso offers a comparative account of three li... read more
This book explores grammatical gender in the Romance languages and dialects and its evolution from Latin. Michele Loporcaro investigates the significant diversity found in the Romance varieties in this regard; he draws on data from the Middle Ages to the prese... read more
This is the first newly prepared, complete edition of Henry Vaughan's poetry and prose for over a century. In the introduction, the reader will find an up-to-date biography of Vaughan, a substantial history of developments in Vaughan scholarship and criticism ... read more
Truth is one of the central concepts in philosophy, and has been a perennial subject of study. Michael Glanzberg has brought together 36 leading experts from around the world to produce the definitive guide to philosophical issues to do with truth. They consid... read more
Today interviews proliferate everywhere: in newspapers, on television, and in anthologies; as a method they are a major tool of medicine, the law, the social sciences, oral history projects, and journalism; and in the book trade interviews with authors are a m... read more
Epistemology, like ethics, is normative. Just as ethics addresses questions about how we ought to act, so epistemology addresses questions about how we ought to believe and enquire. We can also ask metanormative questions. What does it mean to claim that someo... read more
Epistemological discussions of perception usually focus on something other than knowledge. They consider how beliefs arising from perception can be justified. With the retreat from knowledge to justified belief there is also a retreat from perception to the se... read more
Homicide has a history. In early modern England, that history saw two especially notable developments: one, the emergence in the sixteenth century of a formal distinction between murder and manslaughter, made meaningful through a lighter punishment than death ... read more
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