Meet the Editors
Dr. Belle Cheves
Founding Editor
Belle loves helping authors refine their ideas and arguments, and has edited articles and manuscripts in Iranian and Middle Eastern Studies, gender studies, history, art history, sociology, public health, psychology, and anthropology. She has also worked to help scholars hone articles geared for non-academic audiences, and has edited articles translated from Persian. She is proficient in Persian and French, and has reading knowledge of Russian. Belle’s own award-winning research focuses on kinship, domestic service, and enslavement in modern Iran. Belle received her PhD in History and Middle Eastern Studies with a secondary field in the Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality from Harvard University.
Contact: belle@straycats.ink
Dr. Eric Schluessel
Founding Editor
Eric Schluessel is an award-winning author, translator, and scholar of Chinese and Central Asian history. He has worked with over a dozen scholars on their monographs, edited volumes, and articles in Chinese and Inner Asian studies, as well as working as a copyeditor for a Chinese studies journal. Eric’s favorite part of editing is helping a scholar find their own authorial voice. When peer reviews and the stress of revisions make everything muddy and confused, he likes to cut through the gloom to make your ideas shine their brightest. Eric is proficient in Chinese, Uyghur, Manchu, and other Inner Asian languages, including Chaghatay, for which he has written a textbook. His background includes not only history, but also anthropology and policy studies. Eric is not currently taking new clients.
Contact: eric@straycats.ink
Dr. Chloe Bordewich
Founding Editor
Chloe helps writers get to the point while preserving the quirks that make their prose sparkle. She works with scholars of history, art history, anthropology, literary/cinema studies, science and technology studies, and qualitative political science, and with journalists, novelists, translators, museum professionals, and other clients looking to combine research with creative writing. Proficient in Arabic, French, and modern and Ottoman Turkish, she particularly enjoys working with writers coming to English from other languages. Her own research focuses on the politics of information and disinformation in the modern Arab world. She also writes plays and translates fiction from Arabic. Chloe holds a PhD in History and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University.
Contact: chloe@straycats.ink
Dr. Elise Anderson
Editor
Dr. Elise Anderson is a Washington, DC-based area specialist who holds dual PhD degrees in Central Eurasian Studies and Ethnomusicology from Indiana-University Bloomington. Elise’s formal editing experience includes stints as an editorial assistant at a flagship academic journal, a proposal development consultant to graduate students, a freelance academic editor and translator, and a nonprofit professional who works to institute rigorous editorial and accuracy-checking processes where they may be lacking. Her own writing has appeared in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes as well as in public-facing outlets. Since completing her doctorate, Elise has worked in secondary-source reporting on human rights and rule of law, primary-source human rights research and advocacy, and international development program design and implementation. She is fluent in Uyghur and proficient in Mandarin. She is excited to work with clients on all stages of editing for academic monographs and articles, public-facing pieces, and NGO-style reporting. She is especially enthusiastic about working with academics to translate complex research findings into clear, solutions-oriented language accessible to non-specialist audiences, including policymakers.
Contact: info@straycats.ink
Dr. Elizabeth Brogden
Editor
Elizabeth is a Boston-based writer and editor with a PhD in English from Johns Hopkins University. Her peer-reviewed scholarship and academic book reviews have appeared in top journals in her field, and her co-edited interdisciplinary collection, Milieus of Minutiae: Contextualizing Smallness in Literature, Philosophy, and Science, was published by UVA Press in 2024. Her public and creative writing has been featured in Times Literary Supplement, Full-Stop, Bellevue Literary Review, and The Common, among others. In 2024, she was a finalist for the Kenyon Review Short Fiction Contest, and she is currently completing her first post-dissertation book project. She welcomes manuscripts across a range of genres and enjoys helping authors to refine ideas and hone voice at each stage of the drafting process, from developmental feedback to copy edits. She is proficient in French, German, and Italian.
Contact: info@straycats.ink
Sudarshana Chanda
Editor
Sudarshana is a historian of empire, migration, and family in the Indian Ocean in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her research looks at race, immigration, and inter-ethnic intimacies such as marriage and adoption in British Malaya. She has a Master’s in History with a focus on China Studies from the Yenching Academy of Peking University. Sudarshana is most interested in social and cultural histories that prioritize the voices and lives of those who often appear to be an afterthought in mainstream histories. She works with Hindi, Bengali, Chinese, Malay, and Indonesian sources, and welcomes work on gender/family, environment, media, travel, food, and literature. Sudarshana most enjoys editing long-form essays and welcomes inquiries from graduate students and scholars at any stage of the writing process, from conceptualizing to final copy-editing.
Contact: info@straycats.ink
Jasper “Jaz” Joyner
Editor
Jasper Joyner is an award-winning author, poet, and editor who greatly enjoys helping authors find and hone their authentic voice. The Vanderbilt alum’s published works include memoir Pansy—named one of PW’s Booklife’s Best of 2024, Quill Prose Award finalist, and Richard Wright Literary Award winner—chapbook, “A Flamboyance,” and young adult fantasy novel Juniper Leaves. They are skilled in writing poetic prose, and thoughtfully incorporating humor into complex subject matter for nonfiction and varying fiction genres. Their poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in Teen Vogue, The Offing, Oldster Mag, and many others. Joyner also offers their expertise as a mentor and writing instructor at places like Grubstreet and Narratively.
Contact: info@straycats.ink