Interview with Casey Sutcliffe Christ

Casey has been part of the editorial team since 2006, bringing with her a rich background in academia and language instruction. Before joining the German Historical Institute, she spent fourteen years teaching English at German universities and German at American institutions. In December 2000, she earned her Ph.D. in Germanic Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. Her dissertation, “Friedrich Max Müller and William Dwight Whitney as Exporters of Nineteenth-Century German Philology: A Sociological Analysis of the Development of their Linguistic Theories,” reflected her strong interest in both linguistics and intellectual history.

From 2006 to 2009, Casey edited in-house publications and reference guides at the GHI, and from 2009 to 2020 she edited most of the Supplement issues of our Bulletin. She has also served as the in-house editor for the GHI’s book series with Berghahn Books, Studies in German History, since 2012, the managing editor of the Transatlantic Historical Studies series (Steiner Verlag) since 2021, and as the copy editor of the institute’s History of Knowledge and Migrant Knowledge blogs since 2022. In addition to her editing and translation work, she leads a writing seminar at the GHI for staff and affiliated scholars, helping others sharpen their academic writing. Her other responsibilities have included, from 2015 to 2019, serving as Deputy Equality Officer for the Max Weber Foundation, during which she participated in training programs in Germany focused on communication strategies, anti-bullying measures, and equal opportunity law, and helping to manage the institute’s internship program from 2019 to 2021. Her conversation with our colleague Alexa Lässig follows.

Tell us a little about yourself and your academic background. 
Well, after your thorough introduction, let me focus on the period before my career. I grew up in a small town in Oklahoma and then attended high school in San Antonio, Texas. I had a very active and well-connected German teacher there who gave me an opportunity to go to Germany, near Oldenburg, as an exchange student when I was 16. That’s when I really learned to speak German. That set me on a trajectory that would shape my professional life. I studied German and Psycholinguistics at the University of Redlands in Southern California, which, in turn, led to the rest of my career as you outlined above.

After teaching for fourteen years, what inspired the transition from academia into editorial work?

To be honest, the opportunity presented itself. I was looking at the Modern Language Association’s job list as I was still trying to secure a tenure-track position in Germanic Studies in the US and came across the GHI’s advertisement for the editorial position. I thought back on my experience teaching English, especially translation and essay writing, to German students and thought I might be qualified to do the job. I wound up referring a lot to that experience in my interview and calling upon it to complete the editing sample required. In the end, it seemed that my unique path as a Germanist, intellectual historian, and language teacher made me well-suited to the job.

You have a number of different editing and other responsibilities at the GHI. Tell us a little bit about what a typical workday looks like for you.

It is worth noting that being an editor at the GHI Washington means being a “jack of all trades.” That is, I have to edit on all levels. For the Studies in German History series, I am an acquisitions editor, soliciting manuscripts and discussing them with the series editor, currently Simone Lässig, but I am also a copy editor, copy-editing the English manuscripts before sending them to the publisher; sometimes I am a translator of German works we choose to publish in translation, a proofreader when the proofs come in, and occasionally even an indexer. Working in a big publishing house would be very different—I would just take on one of those roles and do it repeatedly. The variation in tasks makes every day a little different. Since I usually juggle several projects at different stages all at once, I can usually determine how to structure my day, shifting between projects so I don’t overtax myself with any one of them. Of course, there are some deadlines that require me to prioritize certain projects on occasion, but otherwise I enjoy setting my own agenda.

How do you balance the demands of editing academic publications with your other responsibilities, such as translation and working on our blogs?

Essentially, I balance the demands the way I juggle the different tasks, switching between them when I need a break from one text or task. Just as the different levels of editing require different skills, the different types of texts require slightly different ways of thinking. I really enjoy coding the blog contributions, for example, because it is an opportunity to focus on details that are not all words, for a change. I get to research photos to include, for example, and contemplate design in a way I do not usually do in editing books (or only very rarely).

What topics do you cover in your writing seminar at the GHI, and what do you hope participants take away from it?

Some of the topics I have talked about are rhetorical differences between German and US/UK academic writing, typical issues Germans have in writing English, how to write with good style in English, and so on. At participants’ request, I also have done several sessions that present the typical features of various genres of writing, such as blog posts, calls for papers, abstracts, book proposals, special issue proposals, CVs and cover letters, book reviews, etc. We also focus a lot on the sentence and paragraph levels of writing. I aim to help participants think a little more analytically about how they write, not least because German academics often have little formal training in writing. Just as when you learn to speak a foreign language and you learn some sets of grammatical and discourse rules that can help you get it right, the writing seminar should give participants some sets of rules they can call upon to guide their writing and make writing in English seem less daunting.

You’re involved in the GHI blogs Migrant Knowledge and History of Knowledge. What role do you think blogs play in public scholarship?

I think blogs help make academic work accessible to a wider audience. After all, a Google search on a given topic might lead even non-academics to our blogs. While the contributions are academic, they usually are presented in a more visually appealing way than, say, an academic monograph, with more pictures and textual markers, like subheadings, as well as links that can take readers to more detailed information and texts that dig deeper into the same issue. But even more important, perhaps, is the way that blogs can help academics to network with one another and get feedback on their ideas early on.

How do you see the relationship between traditional academic publishing and digital platforms evolving?

As Open Access becomes more common and more widely accessible, traditional publishers sometimes struggle to make ends meet. Many publishers of academic books also publish trade books, using the money they make from one or two successful trade titles to basically underwrite their academic publishing, which rarely really makes them much money. I think the combination of traditional and digital publishing presents opportunities—one can do so much more on a website, such as including images, sound and film clips, or providing extensive documentation that there is no space for in a book. Authors can create websites to accompany their books and advertise the website in the book to make the most of both formats. I think there will be more of these sorts of “hybrid” projects going forward. At the same time, with the proliferation of OA titles and the dominance of the Internet, authors need to work harder to draw attention to their books, with more publishers expecting authors to engage in social media and otherwise develop an online presence (such as a website or blog) to help sell their books.

Looking back at your career, what are you most proud of?

Of the projects I have worked on, some stand out, such as Ilko Sascha-Kowalczuk’s End Game: The 1989 Revolution in East Germany, which I translated and Simone Lässig and Andreas Weiß’s edited volume The World of Children, whose introduction and conclusion I also translated. I also particularly enjoyed working on Mischa Honeck, Martin Klimke, and Anne Kuhlmann’s edited volume Germany and the Black Diaspora, and Martin Klimke and Maria Höhn’s monograph A Breath of Freedom. Some of these titles have found a wide readership, and it is very rewarding to feel that I played a role in making the books accessible to English-speaking audiences in the case of translations and generally more readable in the case of copy editing.

I also really enjoyed teaching before coming to the GHI, and it has been very rewarding to me to bring some teaching back into my work with the writing seminar.

You’ve been part of the GHI for nearly two decades. Looking back, what have you taken away from your time here, and how has your experience at the institute shaped you both professionally and personally?

There were special moments, to be sure. I feel particularly proud of translating the 2008 Gerd Bucerius Lecture presented by Jutta Limbach, the former chief justice of the Bundesverfassungsgericht. I also served as her personal liaison, picking her and her husband up at the airport and interpreting for them, including during the Q&A of that event. That was a real highlight. In general, it has been delightful to be adjacent to and get to talk personally with the important people who have passed through the institute’s doors, including among others Marianne Birthler, Gesine Schwan, and Ingo Schulze, whose GHI talk I also translated. Professionally, it has been very satisfying to feel like a part of something larger, to be part of a team. It is quite different from being a professor at a university, where I was usually one of the few representatives of German language and culture on campus, teaching German language primarily to beginners and German literature to a few German majors. Working at the GHI has given me a sense of community and belonging and has even me made me part of the German diaspora community in the DC area (even though I’m not German).

What do you like about Washington DC?

DC is both a political and a cultural hub. The whole world comes together here because of all the embassies, foreign foundations, and government departments. You can find a community of people for any kind of cultural activity which interests you. I just mentioned the greater German community in the region—but there is a community like that from just about everywhere. You can hear so many different languages being spoken on the streets. I have enjoyed being close to important political and cultural figures through my work, but I also loved the opportunities being in the DC area made available for my family in schools and extracurricular activities, and for me, too. My children got to go to some of the best public schools in America and visit world-class museums and see outstanding talents on stage from an early age. Growing up in rural Oklahoma, I knew how isolated one can feel in a small town. My family had to travel an hour to get to Oklahoma City to see concerts or even visit shopping malls or to experience a Michelin-star meal, so I wanted to be sure my children would have these opportunities growing up, and that I would have more opportunities to pursue my hobbies, primarily dancing and singing (I grew up in a very musical household). There is no shortage of dancing troupes, choirs, and amateur theater groups to join!