Sarah O’Brien, PhD
My approach to editing is shaped by my experience as a writing professor and a scholar working at the intersection of film studies and animal studies.
Over the course of eight years of teaching academic writing at research institutions in the United States and Canada, I helped hundreds of student and faculty writers discover and develop their scholarly voices. As an assistant professor in the Writing and Rhetoric Program at the University of Virginia, I taught first-year and advanced writing courses, and co-taught the Seminar for the Teaching of Writing for faculty from across campus. As a writing consultant for postdoctoral fellows and faculty at Georgia Tech’s Communication Center, I worked with more seasoned scholars to hone their academic job materials, journal articles, books proposals, and book manuscripts.
I strive to provide the kind of feedback that I find most valuable as an academic writer: targeted suggestions that encourage you to enliven your prose, clarify your argumentative and analytical claims, strengthen your evidence, and achieve structural coherence. My goal is to maintain the complexity and rigor of academic writing while improving its readability.
Teaching writing has affirmed the value of a dialogic approach to the writing process, and for this reason I include a one-hour meeting (by phone or Zoom) in larger developmental editing projects so that we can discuss my feedback and your revision plans.
My knowledge of the academic publishing process is also informed by my experience publishing articles in several of the top-tier journals in film studies (Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Screen, and Framework); serving as a peer reviewer for journals such as JCMS and PMLA; and securing an advance book contract with University of Michigan Press for my in-process manuscript, Bits and Pieces: (Re-)Viewing Animal Life and Death in Film and Television. I have had the immense fortune of receiving excellent mentorship about writing and publishing from senior colleagues; if you have not found yourself as lucky, I am happy to help you navigate the peer-review process.
You can read more about my research and teaching here.
In my graduate training in comparative literature at the University of Toronto, I became well versed in the disciplinary conventions of literary studies, film and media studies, cultural studies, gender studies, history, and Latin American studies. As a comparativist, I possess a wide-ranging understanding of the nuances of genre and audience. I have also worked with many writers in STEM fields and enjoy the opportunity to edit texts from fields disparate from my own. I am fluent in Spanish and have extensive experience working with writers for whom English is a second (or third or fourth) language.
I also have experience working as a managing editor for a library review journal and as a copyeditor for a local newspaper. My childhood ambitions to be a librarian live on in my interest in digital archives and scrupulous attention to citational practices.
I am a member of the Editorial Freelancers Association and have taken courses offered by the EFA on academic developmental editing and copyediting.
My recent editing projects include books that are in press or under advance contract with Cambridge University Press, Duke University Press, MIT Press, Oxford University Press, Rutgers University Press, Stanford University Press, University of California Press, University of Indiana Press, and University of Michigan Press.
You can read more about my transition from academic teaching/research to editing in this interview for Writing Short is Hard.