Past Positions

Resident Writing Consultant, Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, 2007-

Assistant Professor Copenhagen Business School 2005-2007

Internal English Language Auditor Copenhagen Business School 2003-2005

External Lecturer Copenhagen Business School 2003-2005

PhD Fellow Copenhagen Business School 1999-2003

Teacher (philosophy) Herlev Gymnasium 1998

 

Education

PhD Copenhagen Business School 2004

MA (Philosophy) University of Copenhagen 1999

BA (Philosophy) University of Calgary 1994

 

Academic Background

My work is informed largely by social epistemology. Until now, this subfield has been situated mainly within the broader field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), which in turn emerged from developments within the History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK) in the early 1970s. The term “social epistemology” was first coined in the context of library science, and has become a central normative project within STS. Among the more philosophically oriented approaches, its aim is to describe research activities in order to prescribe for them. My work is an attempt to realize the practical ambitions of social epistemology by seeing it not just as a body of knowledge but as an activity.

Academic writing is a natural site for the practicing social epistemologist. The task here is to understand the changing form and function of academic texts with an eye to making practical, line by line, improvements to the texts produced by researchers. This should be done both in the interest of the researchers, i.e., with the aim of assisting in the publication of their results, and in the interest of the scientific community, i.e., with the aim of improving the critical qualities of academic texts in general.

More specifically, and in a continental European context, a growing field of application can be discerned under the heading “ research as a second language”. Many researchers who do not have English as their first language are today experiencing specific difficulties connecting their own research to that of their peers. As a social epistemologist who is also a native speaker of English, I have found the work of improving the writing skills of these researchers, through continuous editing of their texts, enormously rewarding.

 

Editing Experience

Since 2003, my role at my department has increasingly been that of an in-house editor and writing consultant. I have assisted in the preparation of academic articles and PhD dissertations for publication and helped to foster improved individual and collective writing processes. Most of this work has been concentrated in the areas of management studies, social science and philosophy. It has involved close cooperation with authors and has included coaching, line editing, copy editing and proofreading. In early 2007, these activities were brought together in my current position as resident writing consultant.

 

Teaching Experience

As part of my current position I run writing workshops and seminars on academic publishing in various forms. I also assist in the planning and execution of PhD courses. In the past, I have taught courses in the theory of science and practical reasoning in addition to supervising projects at the undergraduate and master’s levels at the Copenhagen Business School.

 

Other Writing Experience and New Media

have published poetry and literary criticism in the magazines Typo, Word for/Word, Absent and Fascicle. I maintain two weblogs: one focused on academic writing (secondlanguage.blogspot.com) and one focused on poetry and philosophy ( www.pangrammaticon.blogspot.com ). I have also been a regular contributor to Wikipedia, an innovative online, open-source encyclopedia.