RJ Bergmann – Editor

I recently earned my Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Princeton University with four years' experience as a full-time book editor with major publishing houses including Simon & Schuster and Macmillan. I have experience editing everything from fiction to academic articles to college application essays. At present, I specialize in scholarly writing in all fields of the humanities but have also worked in the sciences and social sciences, as well as in a wide variety of non-academic media. I work with writing in all stages of readiness, from book proposals to completed manuscripts to page proofs.

My editing career began on the board of a small literary magazine during my undergraduate years at Harvard University, where I majored in English. I graduated in 2008 and proceeded directly to the Columbia Publishing Course, through which I made my way into my first full-time job as an editor. I moved around the publishing houses of New York from 2008 until 2012. Although I formally moved into the field of higher education at this point, I have continued my editing work on the side throughout.

I pride myself on being able to express complicated ideas simply and on helping my authors do the same for their readers. Writing is hard, and all writers need editors who can listen for the most fundamental meaning of a text and help the writer express it as clearly and engagingly as possible. At the end of the day, both writing and editing are about good communication, and I undertake this work with a friendly and encouraging outlook. An editor's work, in my view, is not just to correct writers, but to empower them.