Jess Herdman | Indexer, Editor, and Designer
I am an indexer, editor, and designer specializing in scholarly publishing in the humanities and social sciences. I provide back-of-the-book and embedded indexes, and I can work from Word, InDesign, PDF, or LaTeX files. My experiences in both academia and publishing have provided me with an ideal basis for understanding clients’ indexing needs. I hold a PhD in cultural history (UC Berkeley, musicology, 2015) and have a wide range of interests that I would be excited to mobilize in support of your project. Over fifteen years of interdisciplinary research and teaching have given me a breadth of specialized knowledge bases, including:
• musicology
• ethnomusicology
• music theory
• history
• cultural history
• colonial history
• Indigenous studies
• postcolonial studies
• cultural studies
• anthropology
• peace and conflict studies
• women’s and gender studies
With substantial experience in design and production within academic, trade, and community-based publications, I am uniquely equipped to understand production deadlines. I was the co-editor of an Indigenous-led magazine, Red Rising, for five years, as well as the design, production, and administrative coordinator for an academic publisher with a trade imprint for two years. 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.
INDEXING QUALIFICATIONS
• Indexing: An Essential Art and Science (SFU)
• Indexers Canada Membership (Member of the Executive, and of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee)
• Mary Newberry Indexers Canada Mentorship (with Mary Newberry)
• Indexers Canada Reading Group
BIO
On the heels of my career as a violinist (BMus, violin performance, University of Ottawa), I completed an MA in musicology/ethnomusicology at the University of British Columbia (2008), with a thesis that explored the relationships between narrative and practice in Cape Breton fiddling and dancing traditions. My subsequent PhD in cultural history 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. This 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 scholarly publishing.
Currently, I work as a freelancer, as well as in editing and production roles with specialized 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.