On darkness and the dissertation: editing Who Carries Our Darkness?

Melissa Kim Corter's doctoral dissertation for Pacifica Graduate Institute — Who Carries Our Darkness? Psychopathy and the Western Shadow — arrived at my desk already alive. The argument, rooted in Jungian and archetypal studies and proceeding by alchemical hermeneutics, asked a question that most scholarship flinches from: what does a culture do with the parts of itself it cannot bear to see?

It turns out I was a specifically prepared reader.

I have long regretted not asking Carol Clover to be my dissertation advisor at UC Berkeley. She was in my department, one of the few genuine Nordic specialists on the faculty, and — as I have only recently come to understand — she had exactly the expertise to help me navigate Lars von Trier. I didn't ask her because I didn't think I was working in the horror genre. Then I went to Denmark to study with Trier directly, and caught something from him — awful and not quite describable — some transmission of his particular darkness. It overtook my doctoral project entirely. The dissertation crashed and burned. Carol would have seen him coming.

So I know something, from the inside, about what it means to carry darkness you didn't choose and couldn't metabolize. A friend of mine watches The Shining before bed — it is her happy place, her way of processing something the film holds safely for her. I never understood this until I read Corter's work. I also spent a month as a researcher on a True Crime production, fielding news alerts for grisly murders in Florida and interviewing the families of victims for a show whose producers were primarily interested in the entertainment value of these stories. I got hives. I lasted a month. There is darkness that art can hold and transform, and darkness that exploitation simply spreads — Corter's dissertation is, among other things, a sustained inquiry into that distinction.

Reading her work carefully, I understood why it found me.

What the archive holds

Archival producing for documentary film is often described as logistics — rights, clearances, licensing fees, deadlines. That is accurate but incomplete. What it actually requires is the ability to read an archive the way a scholar reads a text: with attention to what is present, what is absent, and what the gap between those two things means.

The collections at NARA and the Library of Congress are vast enough to be humbling. Every project I have worked on — from The Bloody Hundredth to Kennedy — has taught me something about how institutions decide what to keep, and therefore what version of the past remains available to us. That is not a neutral process. It is one of the reasons archival work and scholarly editing feel, to me, like variations on the same underlying practice.

On the difference between US and UK English — and why it matters more than you think

The question comes up in almost every project with an international dimension: US or UK English? Most writers treat it as a minor preference. It is not. The choice ripples through spelling, punctuation, hyphenation, and — less obviously — through the implicit signals a text sends about where it was written and for whom.

A manuscript submitted to a British press in American English will be noticed. Not necessarily penalized, but noticed. For scholars writing in English as a second language and targeting Anglophone journals on both sides of the Atlantic, the question of register is worth a deliberate conversation early in the editing process, not a find-and-replace at the end.

The citation audit: what it finds and what it means

A citation audit is not glamorous work. It is, however, some of the most consequential editing I do. On a recent dissertation project, a systematic cross-reference of in-text citations against the reference list turned up thirty-five missing entries, fourteen uncited sources, and twenty-three incomplete references — in a manuscript that had already been through multiple drafts.

This is not unusual. Writers under the pressure of a long project accumulate citations the way researchers accumulate notes: fast, imperfectly, with the intention of cleaning up later. Later arrives, and the cleaning up is harder than expected. An audit treats the reference list as what it actually is — a scholarly commitment, a record of intellectual debts, and the part of your manuscript that committees and peer reviewers check first.