Lead editor: Ursula K. Heise, Marcia H. Howard Chair in Literary Studies in the Department of English at UCLA.

Anthology: Futures of Comparative Literature: ACLA State of the Discipline Report. London: Routledge, 2017.

This anthology consists of essays by and conversations among 64 leading scholars of comparative literature, who reflect on key debates within the discipline and on its theories, methods, and aims. The book collects selected entries first published online in the American Comparative Literature Association’s digital 2014-2015 State of the Discipline Report, and is part of a series of such reports that the ACLA has published once a decade since 1965.

How we worked together:

• I wrote comments on Ursula Heise’s own contributions at her request.
• After the contributions had been reviewed by the editors and revised by their authors, I edited all of them for sentence-level clarity and consistent formatting.
• I managed communications with the contributors and with Routledge.
• I compiled the manuscript, images, and permissions for the press and turned in the final manuscript electronically.
• I answered the copy-editor’s queries and the publisher’s queries about the proofs.
• I proofread the volume, solicited contributors’ corrections to the proofs, and annotated a PDF of the proofs with all the changes.
• I compiled a conceptual index for the volume.

“Michelle Niemann is the single best editor I have ever worked with. Her deep knowledge of several fields in the humanities and social sciences, her sharp intellect and sense of what makes for persuasive arguments, and her meticulous attention to detail have been enormously useful to me in improving both the substance and the form of my book chapters and essays on three different projects. She is also a superb project manager who knows how to keep as many as fifty contributors to a volume on track and on time. With her additional excellence in proofreading and indexing, she delivers manuscripts that press editors praise, with real astonishment, for their polish and consistency, leaving their in-house copy-editors with only minor tasks. Michelle accomplishes all of this with a consistent good cheer and sense of humor that helps even the most harried of writers through the editorial process. I’ll be sure to work with her in all my future publishing projects.”

— Ursula K. Heise, Marcia H. Howard Chair in Literary Studies, Department of English, Institute of the Environment & Sustainability, UCLA, and author of Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species and Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global