Who we are
Kirsty Kay
Ph.D., AnthropologyUniversity of Glasgow, 2020
Zachary Reyna
Ph.D., Political ScienceJohns Hopkins University, 2017
Panos Theodoropoulos
Ph.D., SociologyUniversity of Glasgow, 2020
Uri Gordon
D.Phil., Political TheoryUniversity of Oxford, 2006The Editing Cooperative was created in the spring of 2020 to bring together professional freelance editors and writers from around the world, create a common meeting space, and provide high-quality, fairly priced editing services to academics and other writers.
We started the Editing Cooperative as two - Kirsty Kay and Zachary Reyna, professional editors who are also published writers from the UK and USA. We came together from similar experiences of living and working in countries where English is not the first language, but where academic institutions and publishers favor English as the primary mode of research communication. After a year working with people from across the world, we are building the team to include new members with a wealth of experience.
Working with with all types of projects and writers, our primary goal is to introduce as much linguistic egalitarianism as possible into a global system of communication that increasingly privileges English. We envision a world in which writing and editing are cooperative endeavors and writers and editors collaborate to bring out the best version of the text regardless of whether the writer is seasoned or novice, native or non-native.
Through sharing our resources, time, and experience, the Editing Cooperative seeks to provide consistent, reliable, professional, and tailored editing services at an affordable and fair price. We work individually with each author to establish a fair price, meet their needs, and produce a crisp, clear, and native-sounding text ready for publication.
As editors, academics, and writers, we have specialized training that guarantees a professional and tailored service. Find out more about our individual backgrounds below:
Kirsty Kay
Academic Editor / Non-fiction Editor / Proofreader
Kirsty Kay is an editor, researcher and writer, working with a focus on Central and Eastern Europe. She is a founding member of the Editing Cooperative.
With eight years’ experience in academic editing and research communications, Kirsty has built a network of professional clients across a broad spectrum of institutions and organizations. Since 2015 she has been English Language Editor for Stasis, a bilingual journal of social and political theory based at the European University at St Petersburg. Between 2014 and 2017 she was co-editor of the Scottish Journal of Performance, and has since worked for a wide range of clients such as the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the British Museum, Central European University Press, Metropol Verlag, as well as for individual academics on journal articles, book chapters and monographs.
Kirsty has an interdisciplinary academic background, working within area studies, religious studies and anthropology. Her Ph.D. from the University of Glasgow investigated questions of nation-building and cultural memory in the tánchaz movement, a folk-dance revival in contemporary Hungary, as well as wider issues in nationalism theory and anthropology. She is publishing a chapter in an upcoming volume on cultural memory and dance for the Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies series. Her current work explores the historical and contemporary uses of travel culture within national narratives.
Kirsty is a member of the Chartered Institute for Editors and Proofreaders, the main non-profit body supporting editors in the United Kingdom. Kirsty has been dedicated to helping people communicate in English since her early days as an English language teacher in Budapest. Her work experience and interdisciplinary research interests have led her to understand the vital need to break down unnecessary boundaries in the communication of ideas and cultures, an increasingly radical prospect in the current age. In her work with the Editing Cooperative, she hopes to build on this commitment.
Zachary Reyna
Academic Editor / Writer / Proofreader
Zachary Reyna (b. Chicago, USA, 1988; Ph.D., Johns Hopkins Univ., 2017) is an editor and political theorist working at the intersection of the environmental humanities, political ethnography, and literary studies. He has over 12 years’ experience editing colleagues’, students’, and clients’ academic articles, essays, and dissertations. From 2012-2017 he worked as an editor for the Q1 journal Political Theory (Sage Publications). From 2016-2022 he taught academic writing at Johns Hopkins University (USA), Tyumen State University (Russia), and Leiden University (Netherlands).
Zach is the author of How Law Matters: Reconsidering the Natural Law Tradition (2017) which was the first book-length study of the New Materialisms and law; “Aquinas’s Ecological Vision” (2018) which was awarded the American Political Science Association Best Paper Award in Foundations of Political Thought; “Toward a More Robust New Materialist Politics” (2020); “The Animality of Simone Weil” (2021); and “Law’s Stench: the Legal Ecology of Antigone” (2023). His current research pursues a political ethnography of multispecies utopian community experiments in the Global North. He has most recently finished a Marie Curie fellowship (2021-2023) at Leiden University and is currently based in Bremen, Germany.
Zach is a member of the Editorial Freelancers Association, the largest and oldest professional organization for freelance editors in the United States. As a writer and teacher of academic writing, he understands how difficult writing can be and he is passionate about helping others structure and convey their ideas as cogently, powerfully, and simply as possible. His time in Russia has introduced him to numerous brilliant scholars and writers struggling in English and he is committed to helping similar writers polish their writing for publication in English.
To find out more about Zach, check out his website.
Panos
Theodoropoulos
Academic Editor / Non-fiction Editor / Journalism Editor / Proofreader
Panos Theodoropoulos is a writer and editor currently based in Athens, Greece. He has a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Glasgow and his work has been published in ROAR Magazine, Bella Caledonia, the Journal of Labour and Society, and Babylonia.
Panos’s academic research focuses on the intersections of migrant labour, precarity, and social movements. More specifically, his PhD utilised covert ethnographic methods to enter various precarious workplaces as a worker and investigate the barriers that migrant workers face in relation to trade union participation.
Panos also has years of experience in editing and proofreading a wide range of academic and non-academic articles. From 2017 to 2020, Panos was a co-editor of the Glasgow-based blog Interregnum.live, an initiative that aimed to promote the radical imaginary in all of its dimensions, attempting to contribute new ways of perceiving and analysing our collective existence. The blog received numerous submissions from around the world, affording Panos the opportunity to edit and proofread contributions from a range of linguistic backgrounds.
Panos always aims to respect the author's voice as much as possible while helping foreground and clarify the beauty and ideas that are contained in the text. As a bilingual speaker of both English and Greek, he understands how to support the written expression of non-native and native English-language writers alike. Panos is excited to be joining the Editing Cooperative and looks forward to receiving your work.
Uri
Gordon
Academic Editor
Uri Gordon is an academic editor based in Leicester, UK.