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I’m Jess and I love books.
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.
My 6-year-old Björk and Deerhoof superfan inspires me to be creative, inquisitive, and empathetic in everything I do.
About Me: About Me
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