Portfolio – 'Worlds of Consumption' Series

During my tenure at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC, I edited the first ten books of the Worlds of Consumption series, published by Palgrave Macmillan. I accompanied most of them from the initial book proposal to the final page proofs. Seven of these were edited collections, and three were translated monographs.

Jewish Consumer Cultures in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Europe and North America. 2022. Edited by Paul Lerner, Anne Schenderlein, and Uwe Spiekermann.
Consumer Engineering, 1930s–1970s: Marketing between Expert Planning and Consumer Responsiveness. 2019. Edited by Jan Logemann, Ingo Köhler, and Gary Cross.
Bright Modernity: Color, Commerce, and Consumer Culture. 2017. Edited by Regina Lee Blaszczyk and Uwe Spiekermann.
Food and Foodways in Italy from 1861 to the Present. 2016. By Emanuela Scarpellini.¹
The Science of Beauty: Culture and Cosmetics in Modern Germany, 1750–1930. 2015. By Annelie Ramsbrock.²
Berlin’s Black Market, 1939–1950. 2015. By Malte Zierenberg.³
Globalizing Beauty: Consumerism and Body Aesthetics in the Twentieth Century. 2013. Edited by Hartmut Berghoff and Thomas Kühne.
The Rise of Marketing and Market Research. 2012. Edited by Hartmut Berghoff, Philip Scranton, and Uwe Spiekermann.
The Development of Consumer Credit in Global Perspective: Business, Regulation, and Culture. 2012. Edited by Jan Logemann.
Decoding Modern Consumer Societies. 2012. Edited by Hartmut Berghoff and Uwe Spiekermann.

Food and Foodways in Italy was translated from the Italian by Noor Giovanni Mazhar. In my experience, a good academic translation is a collaborative process involving at least two major drafts. First there is the work done by the translator, ideally in collaboration with the author, as was the case here. Second, the text needs to be revised in light of readability, taking into account the new publishing context and academic audience. This second aspect required additional work by the author, who reviewed my edits and answered my countless questions, often consulting the translator as well. With this in mind, I was especially pleased with the final words of Roger Horowitz’s endorsement on the back cover: “the book is blessed as well with an inspired and at times lyrical translation.” ↩︎
Editing David Burnett’s translation of The Science of Beauty was a collaborative process between me and the author only. The German had been extremely complex places, especially given the book‘s wide–ranging source base. I found myself editing not only for readability in a new context but also ironing out ambiguities and potential misunderstandings. It was slow going for me at times (involving much retranslation), and I had lots of questions for the author, whose acknowledgments later included gratitude “to Mark Stoneman for his superb editing of the English text, which went beyond the normal call of duty.” I was subsequently gratified by an unusual remark Mary Jo Maynes made in a book review: “The quality of the translation . . . needs to be noted. The English is smooth and readable despite the range of sources from which long quotes are drawn, and despite the many vocabularies, including technical vocabularies, that the study navigates.” (Germany History 34, no. 1 (March 2016): 161–63.) ↩︎
I only edited the introduction and first chapter of this translated monograph. Patricia “Casey” Sutcliffe did the rest. ↩︎