A little about me

Between my undergraduate and graduate student years, I worked in Germany as an ESL teacher and as logistics personnel in a department store called Peek & Cloppenburg, where I learned the German words for hanger (der Bügel) and drawer (die Schublade). I met my now husband at a 4th of July party in Heidelberg, and after living on two different continents for a year, I decided it was time to come back stateside. I enrolled in an MA program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati, and my life in academia began.

I was really interested (and still am) in Muslim women’s feminisms in the German context, which ultimately led me to pursue a degree in German Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. While there, I learned about German literature, contemporary German culture, and European theories of race, and also earned a graduate certificate in Jewish Studies. I’m grateful for these six years in particular for instilling in me a love for the humanities and for academic writing.

In 2019, I graduated with my PhD and moved my daughter (then 3 years old), my husband, my two dogs, and myself across the country to take a one-year position as a Visiting Assistant Professor of German Studies at Davidson College. My contract was renewed for an additional two years, and then renewed again, allowing me to experience academia from the professor side of things for 5 years total. I LOVED teaching, my students, many of my colleagues (especially those in the German Studies department), and the idea of being a professor, but being contingent faculty, craving a rootedness not promised when pursuing a career in academia, and the administrative drama had me wishing for more. When my contract ended in 2024, I decided that that would be that: I did not want to move my family (now four of us + 2 dogs and fish) again, and I didn’t want to be contingent anymore.

After some reflection (and a brief stint working for an AI company—more on that never), I realized that I had been doing something I loved all along that I could now allow to expand into all those work hours formerly dedicated to professor things. I had been editing students’ and scholars’ work for years, going back to my training as a writing tutor in Cincinnati, and adored it. So, I made the decision to shift my focus, embrace the entrepreneurship so prevalent in my family at which I had rolled my eyes for so many years (my extended family has self-made businesses in the monument, golf, marketing, veterinary, cidery-making, and logistics industries…), and start Frazier-Rath Editing & Indexing.

I’ve been able to combine so many things I’ve valued over the years—helping people, intellectual rigor, teaching, grammar—and to learn so many things; I’ve worked on manuscripts across the humanities and social sciences on topics ranging from ancient divinatory practices, to 18th century conceptions of the self, to the role of emotions in generative AI, to the representation of disability in contemporary literature. I’ve also enjoyed working with people in various stages of their careers, from graduate students finishing their theses, to junior faculty working towards tenure, to established faculty publishing their second books. I continue to learn as much as I can about developmental editing, line and copyediting, and indexing and cannot seem to get enough of it; this is a feeling, I realized, that I had not felt for awhile when I was officially “in” academia.

Though I can bring some tough-love to the table if need be (and if requested; I am, after all, a parent), I prefer building relationships with authors centered on mutual respect and trust, which allows me to bring my authentic self to the work. I think of myself as an author’s biggest advocate, and once called in, will do whatever I can to ensure the author achieves their writing goals.

If that’s the kind of editor you are looking for, please reach out.