Bilingual editor with humanities background? Say more
If you are considering hiring an editor, it helps to get to know them a little. The most effective way to do this is to have a phone or video call, but it is nice to have a little more information first, right? Although you may have already seen my About page, in this post I’ll give you an idea of my own scholarly background.
Spanish language learner
For me, having multiple degrees in Spanish is not a particularly specific way to describe my studies. Yes, I started studying Spanish in middle school and spent part of my high school and undergraduate years advancing my capabilities in the language. However, it wasn’t the grammar that inspired me to keep going, but rather the cultures and ideas I was gaining access to through my engagement with the language. Sometimes I explain it in this (reductive) way: if language scholars are split into two big, overlapping camps, with “language study” on one side and “arts and culture” on the other, I fall into the latter camp.
What all this means is that, of the twenty-one years that I studied Spanish in a school or university setting, over half of them were spent using the language to learn via texts that might not have been accessible to me had I not been able to speak Spanish. Many of the big ideas that captured my attention could also have been researched via another discipline or another language. But my background in Hispanophone histories and cultures, gained in my language education, became my gateway to and my framework for these ideas.
This is not to downplay my deep affection for Spanish, and I certainly don’t think that my trajectory would have been the same if I had been in another discipline. If you have spent any time in a university language department, you understand this discrepancy and know what questions to ask to resolve it. But for those outside of that particular bubble, I think it is worth working a little harder to explain my research interests and experience.
Memory studies
I have long been fascinated by the cultural process of remembering on an individual and collective scale. This is an interest rooted in a love of history and how it is constantly being unsettled and reestablished. I consider the concept of archive, what counts as an archive, and the way that the archive affects what and how we remember. I have also written about the effect of trauma on memory as represented on film. The bulk of my research experience has been on the cultural production and history of dictatorship and post-dictatorship Chile, Argentina, and Spain.
Justice
To me, memory and justice go hand-in-hand as research interests, as much of the reworking of history is carried out with an aim toward procuring justice and a better future. Justice can take many forms, whether it is legal consequences for crimes committed, working a forgotten perspective into an established history, or reforming representation in a government, just to name a few examples of this never-ending work. My interest here started during my bachelor’s degree in political science, examining international responses to human rights violations, and undergirded my interests up through my dissertation, which discussed justice as something that, while it will never fully arrive, is worth working toward with imagination and uncertainty.
Film
I do love a movie! Film is the text I am most familiar with, and I use it to analyze how we remember the past. This can be done with both fiction and documentary film. I wrote my master’s thesis on Chilean documentaries of the post-dictatorship, and my dissertation on Chilean documentary maker Patricio Guzmán’s latest four films. Image and montage complicate our sense of time and allow for unexpected juxtapositions and insights in a way I find fascinating.
Other literature, art, and theory
My dissertation topic (which I’ll write more about in future posts) and my most recent research interests, of course, took a while to develop. Previous courses and projects took me through a range of topics and gave me varying degrees of insight into different areas of study. I remember fondly courses about film from Spain’s periphery, the Latin American avant-garde, electronic literature, Southern Cone literature, and literary adaptation in Peninsular film. I took graduate seminars on Marxism in Latin America; the relationship between seeing and power; cinema and the city; colonialism; the Spanish Republic; theoretical debates in contemporary Hispanic Studies; film studies; and media infrastructures. Among other things, I wrote on urban space in Argentine film noir; the relationship between Dada and Surrealism; universal human rights as they intersect with indigenous rights and settler colonialism; the unknown in the political and Roberto Bolaño’s Nocturno de Chile; film in the Spanish Republic and Spanish Civil War; José María Arguedas’s Yawar fiesta; Latinamericanism and the subaltern; and Walter Benjamin’s writing as it relates to documentary film. This is a wide breadth of topics dealing with a wide variety of texts.
Experience abroad
During college, I spent a semester living in Granada, Spain, living with a Spanish host family and attending classes at the Centro de Lenguas Modernas at the Universidad de Granada. Between undergrad and grad school, I spent three months living in Santiago de Chile, working as an intern at Chile Transparente, the Chilean Chapter of Transparency International, where I researched transparency practices in Chilean multinational companies. Both immersion experiences were invaluable to my language skills and growth as a person and professional.
Language instructor
At two universities, I taught multiple levels of Spanish language, literature, and film courses for fifteen semesters. The vast majority employed the communicative language teaching approach. I was also once a long-term substitute covering the maternity leave of a high school Spanish teacher.
Thanks for learning more. Now, over to you!
I hope this elaboration on the brief identifier “bilingual editor with humanities background” has been helpful. If you identify with elements of my trajectory, or if our interests overlap somewhere, I hope you’ll reach out for editing services so that I can use our shared experience to the benefit of your writing project. If not, this wide breadth of experience demonstrates that I am no stranger to familiarizing myself with a new area of study, and I hope you’ll reach out for editing services so that I can help ensure that your writing is accessible to a newcomer. Either way, I’ll be glad to hear from you!
