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Academic editing
• Books • Papers
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Book copyediting for historian
The client:
Research fellow at a leading Italian research organisation
The brief:
Barbara Di Gennaro Splendore is an Italian historian and a research fellow at CREA, Italy's primary research organisation dedicated to agrifood supply chains. An expert on early modern medicine, her latest book explored the political, commercial and pharmaceutical power of the antidote theriac in Renaissance Italy.
Due for publication August 19, 2025 by Harvard University Press, The State Drug demonstrates how regimes and medical authorities secured support by promoting certain medicines, and sheds new light on the relationship between medicine and power in early modern Europe.
Barbara's English is flawless, but for 100,000 words she still sought a native speaker to edit her book. I copyedited and proofread The State Drug over the course of 2 months, in addition to spending weekly calls with Barbara assessing the book line by line for narrative structure and readability.

I liked working with someone with a fresh voice. You did a fantastic job of making the text more readable, elegant and idiomatic, and I'm very grateful for that.

Barbara Di Gennaro Splendore
I did advise against hyphenating job-quality in the title—it's not wrong, but this isn't an instance in which the hyphen clarifies ambiguity, and less punctuation produces a cleaner aesthetic. However, the client's coauthor readded the hyphen prior to publication. The horror of this incident still keeps me up at night.
Paper copyediting for political scientist
The client:
Professor at one of the world's most prestigious business schools
The brief:
Janine Leschke is a German professor of Comparative Labour Market Analysis at the Department of Management, Society and Communication at Copenhagen Business School. She had coauthored a 12,000-word paper for the journal Economic and Industrial Democracy, which she needed copyediting by a native speaker for readability.

Joseph was recommended to me by another academic. I'm thankful he was! He took the project in his stride, never intimidated by its scope or the fact he was unfamiliar with the subject. He worked fast but accurately, editing the entire paper with plenty of time left for amends and back-and-forth with me and my coauthor.
Even more importantly, Joseph was receptive to and respectful of the voice of the piece, ensuring native readability while taking care that none of the authors' passion was lost in the copyediting process. I have since recommended him to academic peers, and hope to work with him again one day.

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