Meet Our Acquisitions Team: Erin Sweany
Posted by Becky Straple-Sovers on April 27, 2023
Meet our acquisitions team! In this series of blog posts, learn a little bit more about our acquisitions editors: Tyler Cloherty, Erin Sweany, and Emily Winkler.
Erin Sweany
Erin holds a Ph.D. in medieval English literature from Indiana University. She specializes in Old English literary and medical texts and has also published on Middle English texts. Her particular scholarly projects focus on descriptions of illness and medicine and the experiences of unwell bodies and bodies undergoing medical care, whether those descriptions and experiences be a part of literary or pragmatic texts. Erin’s methodological interests are broad and include philology, feminist methodologies, new historicism, new/feminist materialisms, medical humanities, ecocriticism, post/settler-colonialism and science and technology studies.
Erin works with authors researching literary and manuscript topics of the early medieval British Isles and Scandinavia. "For Publications of the Richard Rawlinson Center," she explains, "I am excited to work on projects with both new and established scholars on manuscripts that engage significantly with Old English texts. For the Northern Medieval World, I acquire texts with both narrow and broad geographic, cultural, and linguistic scope. For both series, I especially welcome projects that use a textual lens to explore the experiences of the various cultures that literary and non-literary texts emerged from and were a part of." Erin has a particularly strong interest in projects that engage with questions related to health, medicine, bodies (living, dead, or anywhere in between), plants (and other aspects of the other-than-human world), manuscripts and their history, and field history, but welcomes proposals having to do with any facet of literature and culture of the early medieval British Isles and Scandinavia.
As an acquisitions editor, Erin especially enjoys supporting authors through the publication process. She says, "As a researcher and writer myself, I know that working through project proposals, readers’ reports, and details of style guides can be overwhelming, and even emotional—even if the ultimate result of a more intellectually sophisticated and sound final product is worth it. I am personally supported and enriched by many friends and colleagues who workshop my own projects with me, and I find the most rewarding aspects of my relationship with colleagues has been helping them to process reader’s reports, strategizing revision plans, and keeping their spirits up with my confidence that they will turn a good idea into a great publication." Erin thinks that this approach is welcome and supported at MIP: "MIP is staffed by a collection of scholars who are genuinely enthusiastic about a wide variety of primary sources and methodologies. If you want to work with editors who will be excited about your project throughout the publication process, then please consider MIP."
All of our acquisitions editors will be at the 2023 International Congress on Medieval Studies. Erin's looking forward to the learning opportunities offered by the Congress: "As a literature and language scholar working with medical texts, I love to pick a session per day outside of the methodologies I am trained in and learn more about how different disciplines approach the texts, cultures, and topics that I research. I especially love getting crash courses in technical vocabulary at anthropology sessions and learning about the many different kinds of data that can be used to let the past speak to us a bit more clearly." Erin is happy to be approached in person by authors at the Congress, but also encourages authors to email her, even if you speak at Congress, to follow up on your in-person discussions.
For those who might be thinking of proposing a project to MIP, Erin suggests, "Be excited about getting new and different perspectives on your manuscript from editors and series boards! While the gatekeeping processes for academic publishing can evoke a lot of emotions (which makes sense, you’ve put so much work into every version of your manuscript!), it is also an invaluable opportunity to reshape and grow your scholarship into something more exciting than you likely first envisioned." And our acquisitions editors and staff members are here to help you on each step of the way.
Along with email, you can also find Erin on Twitter and LinkedIn, and you can fill out a prospective projects form to reach our acquisitions editors!
Erin's Series: