Quotes from the Interview
Learning
editing is a craft. I realize there are courses, but it’s not the kind of thing
where you pick up a set of skills that are written down and you can just follow
them. You
learn from other people.
There
does come a moment when I have to stop editing, and I think authors are happy
about that. Like really happy.
In
my ideal world I have a full manuscript and a quiet room at home with my dogs
and don’t have the computer screen anywhere near me. I start with my pencil, a
clipboard, my eraser…
I
absolutely have seen fields that have shifted and changed as a result [of 9/11]. I was
sitting in a classroom at the University of Texas, a graduate seminar, where
the students were asking ‘Why do you
think that diplomatic history and foreign relations are so vibrant?’ I looked
around at them and thought about their ages and realized they had never known a
pre-9/11 world as adults, and so to them it made no sense why this had ever happened.
There was no sense of
well, we didn’t always have military placed in this part of the world before... I
found that unsettling because I felt really old, but I also thought this is a
perfect example of a sea change that happened and if you’re on one side of it
you see it so clearly, and if you’re on the other with your worldview, you’ve
never known another one.
On recent historiography: Deep down, I worry that there’s not a new and
emerging way of writing and thinking that I’ve seen during the course of my
editorial career and I don't know when that moment will come. I see a lot of circularity. It’s new ways of
putting together sub-disciplines that splintered apart. I think more about the
splintering and how much specialization happened in the period before I was
in editorial work, and how the trends that I see are more about starting to
bring some of those pieces back together. It’s something I think about a lot, because I
don’t know what will stand the test of time. And I’m sort of making that bet every time I acquire a
book.
Sometimes
it’s about translating people's language into how they would have said it before
they got a Ph.D.
There
used to be a storage room where I would keep the edited manuscripts in, and I
had, granted, piled them up for much longer than I should have. And that room
was needed back and I remember that experience of standing there with one of
those gigantic recycling bins, the ones that are on wheels, and filling that
entire thing up and thinking ‘That’s all my work.’ I remember how
hard that was, throwing those out. At
the end of the day, though, I think if it was all about my ego, I wouldn’t be
an editor. 
More
than the process, it's about the connection with
somebody whose writing it is. And some of those relationships have been so
important and so meaningful to me. It is hard to let some of them go because you enjoy that experience
so much.
A
constant in publishing: There was always a golden age, and it was always
sometime back before you started. Everybody’s worrying and wondering if [the
industry] is dying, if the monograph is dying, all the things that can go
wrong. I work at a company [Oxford University Press] that is less pessimistic than that by a long shot. No
matter how long I do this job, I will only be a blip on a 500-year history.
There’s
a lot of industry burnout, not just lay-offs, etc., but about how
many responsibilities and tasks have gotten added onto the acquisition of
projects, development of projects, attending conferences. We’ve
talked a lot about editing, but so much of our job is not about that. You're always trying to juggle lots and lots of things and lots of different phases
and at the same time always trying to project that, no, that project is the most important thing
in your court.It’s a time of change [in university publishing]. I’m
not completely change-averse, but I’m not change-happy either. Sometimes I ask 'Can we ever just
have a year where we’re just doing what we did before, where we just sign books
and create products?' That seems heretical.
We
look for niches and want things that will replicate the success of
something that has come before, and so to some degree you’re going back to the
well. So how many times can you go back to the same well and have your list
look new and fresh and original? Being
the ground-breaker is not always the role that I feel like I want to play, but
to bring things to their highest level of realization, that’s a better place to
be.
What
I really like are campus trips, because when you’re looking at someone’s
bookshelves and talking with them about what they teach, even if it’s not someone
you think you’re going to work with, there’s something that comes up in that
conversation about some
undergraduate class that they’ve taught, or people say things that
they wouldn’t say to their next-door neighbor at work, or sometimes even to their family
about what working on projects means to them, or about being ill and working on
intellectual work, and what’s going on with their kids and their marriages. I am a
repository.
All
these big manuscripts, they are bad for my spine! And my posture’s terrible and
I’ll be complaining about my eyesight…. We’re just bad physical specimines and
we’re all weird birds anyway. 
