Dr Ben Pritchett | Editor and Proofreader

A freelance editor and proofreader, specialising in arts and culture.

Academic background:

• First class degree in English language and literature from the University of Oxford
• Distinction-level master’s in criticism and culture from Cambridge
• PhD in history of art from the Open University

I trained with the Society for Editors and Proofreaders (SfEP), which became the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP) in March 2020. I am a professional member of the Institute.

The levels of editing that I can undertake range from an initial manuscript review, through developmental and line editing, to proofreading. That is to say, I can provide analytic feedback on high-level conceptual and structural points, and also help to refine details of style, grammar, and vocabulary.

Normally I use Word for copy-editing, and Acrobat for proofreading, but I am open to discussion if you prefer a different system.

My experience includes editing scholarly texts: postgraduate student papers, journal articles, and a book. I have also worked in-house as a dictionary assistant at Oxford University Press, and as a freelance copy-editor for Taschen.

I have worked for an author with dyslexia, and others with English as their second language.

Although I mainly work on non-fiction, I would also be happy to consider fiction (including film and theatre scripts) and poetry, since I have studied and analysed many classics in depth.

Academic specialisms:

• Art and technoscience
• Art in political and economic context
• British constructivist art between 1956 and 1978
• Cultural criticism
• Critical cultural theory
• Marxism
• Modern English literature
• Modern, postmodern, and contemporary art of the 20th and 21st centuries
• Raymond Williams and the New Left

Topics of personal interest:

• Animal rights, ecology, environmentalism, vegetarianism, and veganism
• Cinema/film, particularly documentary, artists’, and experimental (I also occasionally freelance as a filmmaker)
• Feminism, gender, and sexuality
• Philosophy
• Postcolonialism
• Post-structuralism
• Psychoanalysis

I am quite happy to consider other subjects too; for example I have edited a PhD thesis on international relations and monetary systems.