Olivier: Hello, Charles. You recently joined Standard Error as an academic editor. Welcome! Will you tell us more about yourself and your career?

Charles: It probably says a lot about me that your question calls to mind the opening line of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Barnardo: “Who’s there?”), a line that, from the very outset, indicates that the play is fundamentally concerned with the question of identity. Perhaps the best way to answer this question is to say something about my background: I came from a Mexican American and Italian American military family, grew up in southern New Jersey, southern Illinois, and central Texas, and was a low- to middle-income first-generation college student at Princeton University before earning master’s and doctoral degrees at Duke University. As a child, I had a strong aptitude for STEM subjects, but some extraordinary English and social studies teachers in high school reoriented my interests toward the humanities and social sciences. I went to Princeton with the expectation of being a philosophy major, but a freshman course on Shakespeare after 1600 changed my life and led me to pursue literary and theater studies.

I consider myself a humanist-educator-intellectual, curious about the world and the people who inhabit it and happy to contribute to building, in my modest way, the global knowledge base.

At Duke, I taught several undergraduate courses in Renaissance and modern drama, co-led a theater program in London for several summers, and conducted research in the archives of the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Shakespeare Centre in Stratford-upon-Avon. After finishing my PhD, I worked in administration at Duke for a year in learning services and program management in the Academic Resource Center, and I then began working as an editor with American Journal Experts, which at the time was seeking education editors.

Over the years, the range of areas of study that I edited in grew enormously to include not only education and humanities and social sciences fields but also law, policy analysis, public administration, management, organizational studies, and certain STEM fields such as AI/ML. In parallel with my editorial career, I’ve taught and done curriculum development with Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, Duke’s noncredit, volunteer-based senior citizen and retiree adult education program, mainly working on courses in modern and contemporary drama and theater. Thus, given my educational background, teaching experience, and work in academic publishing and research communication, I consider myself a humanist-educator-intellectual, curious about the world and the people who inhabit it and happy to contribute to building, in my modest way, the global knowledge base.

OSC: You have long experience with research editing. Will you tell us more about why you started in this line of work, what you enjoy about it, and why you think it’s an important part of academic writing?

CJDD: I started doing research editing back in 2013 because it was simply a nice fit for me, both personally and professionally. I’ve always appreciated the ability to work remotely. Working from home has become commonplace since COVID-19, but when the pandemic struck, I’d already been doing it for years. I also love the flexibility that research editing provides; I’ve been able to teach over 20 courses and do several years of curriculum development work with Duke thanks to this flexibility. I have a lot of fun reading and learning about new lines of research every day.

Professionally, as a student, teacher, and administrator, I’ve always been close to higher education. In transitioning from working in university program administration to working as an academic editor, I’ve been able to work with academics in a different kind of way, one more tied to the research mission that defines much of higher education. Working as an academic editor is a satisfying alt-ac career, and I strongly believe in the importance of the work that I do. Over the years, I’ve edited over 5,000 manuscripts, a significant percentage of which were initially unpublishable and never would have been published had it not been for my intervention. The work carried out by academic editors is crucial: Yes, we correct typos and grammatical errors, but more importantly, we sharpen the language and make it clearer and more precise. This last aspect is important because, to quote the philosopher John Searle, “if you can’t say it clearly, you don’t understand it yourself.”

OSC: On top of research editing, you have significant experience with theater. Can you elaborate on this experience, and why you enjoy the theater?

CJDD:  As I mentioned, a Shakespeare course that I took as a freshman at Princeton absolutely changed my life, and I was lucky enough to take other excellent courses in theater history and dramatic literature. Furthermore, Princeton had an outstanding undergraduate theater scene, and I saw dozens of good-to-great student productions (as well as one or two bad ones!). I myself served as a stage musician a couple times, playing percussion for productions of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Richard III, which was great fun.

Ultimately, though, it was grad school at Duke that solidified my love of theater. In addition to teaching various courses in theater history and dramatic literature, I was fortunate to co-lead a study abroad theater program in London for four summers. During that time, I was able to see somewhere between 100 and 150 plays, including many with the greatest stage actors in the English-speaking world, such as Simon Russell Beale, Ralph Fiennes, Patrick Stewart, Juliet Stevenson, Eve Best, and Natasha Richardson, and running the gamut from experimental theater from the Continent to new plays receiving their premiere productions.

Working as an academic editor is a satisfying alt-ac career, and I strongly believe in the importance of the work that I do.

Nowadays, my wife and I not only go to see local productions but also occasionally travel to New York to see Broadway plays or Ontario to the Shaw Festival. I’ll always be committed to the theater, its potential to change people’s lives and how people see the world, and its utopian potential to create community. Theater studies tells us that the theater is where the audience happens. That, too, has been my experience, and I love it!

OSC: Finally, what is your favorite activity to spend your spare time?

CJDD: In my spare time, I like to cook, read, and go to the movies and live performances (not only plays but also orchestral concerts and chamber music and piano recitals), but my favorite activity is simply spending time with my wife and two cats.

Figure 1 – Charles with his wife Teresa attending a North Carolina Symphony Orchestra concert.

You can find Charles on LinkedIn

You can learn more about Standard Error Research Editors’ team here.