who I am

My name is Jean Allman and I am a recently retired tenured professor, who has spent her career in universities. (Click here to see an abbreviated cv.)

Since 1997, editing has been a constant in that career. My dedication comes, in part, from starting this journey as a first-generation college student. It has been fueled over the years by a commitment to challenging the gatekeeping mechanisms in academia, including in academic publishing. This is work for which I’ve always had a strong passion. 

Over the course of my career, I have been co-editor of two award-winning book series:  Heinemann’s Social History of Africa series and Ohio University Press’s New African Histories series. The two series published over one hundred monographs during the years I served as co-editor (1997-2023). My work with these monographs did not simply entail acquisition, as is often the case with academic editors, but included a great deal of developmental and line editing. The overwhelming majority of the writers I worked with were first time book authors. 

In addition to book editing, I co-edited the Journal of Women’s History for nearly six years and, as director of the Center for the Humanities, regularly headed up workshops on book proposal and grant proposal writing, and led many “First Book Workshops” for tenure-track colleagues.  I have further honed my editorial, curatorial, and evaluative skills via my own experiences as a published author (monographs, articles, co-authored books, and co-edited collections), a successful grant writer, a frequent grant reviewer (ACLS, NEH, Fulbright, etc.), a member of several book prize committees, and the advisor to numerous doctoral dissertations and master’s theses.

As I stepped away from my university faculty position in 2023, developmental editing was the piece of my career I wanted to keep with me. 

So here I am – Jean Allman, freelance developmental editor!