I’m Jess and I love books.

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I'm an indexer, editor, and designer specializing in scholarly publishing. On the heels of my career as a violinist, I completed an MA in musicology/ethnomusicology at the University of British Columbia (2008) with a thesis on community narratives surrounding Cape Breton fiddling. My subsequent PhD in musicology at UC Berkeley (2015) was deeply interdisciplinary, with a dissertation that examined the affective musical economies that rallied communities to violence during the early modern Wars of Religion in France. I then had the opportunity to focus on the mutation of these musical modes into the colonial context through two postdocs that focused on Wendat matriarchs’ musical diplomacy in seventeenth-century Wendaké.

My postdoctoral research was accompanied by heaps of teaching across disciplines, and a lot of work with community-based media. This grassroots work allowed me to segue from academia into a position as the design, production, and administrative coordinator for an academic publisher with a trade imprint. During this time I also completed training through SFU in indexing, a Certificate in Editorial Standards through Queen’s University, and coursework in design through OCAD.

I have since moved into freelancing, as well as editing and production contracts with academic publications, such as the bilingual Intersections: Canadian Journal of Music Research / Intersections : revue canadienne de musique and Canadian Journal of Music Therapy / Revue canadienne de musicothérapie.

I aim to practice trauma-informed editing, indexing, and design and to mobilize conscious style and design justice principles—which means that I listen to your needs, work collaboratively on effective modifications, provide transparency about processes and input, and think critically about how your piece can activate language and layout that empowers.

​Through my experience as an interdisciplinary scholar, I am able to engage deeply with humanities or social sciences writing. Based on my own research and teaching, I also have specialized knowledge of:

• musicology

• ethnomusicology

• music theory

• history

• cultural history

• colonial history

• Indigenous studies

• postcolonial studies

• cultural studies

• anthropology

• literary studies

• peace and conflict studies

• women’s and gender studies

This disciplinary understanding allows me to treat your publication’s content with care in terms of conceptual indexing, editorial judgment, and image treatment and layout.

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My 6-year-old Björk and Deerhoof superfan inspires me to be creative, inquisitive, and empathetic in everything I do.