About
Background & Credentials
PhD — German language & literary studies
University teaching — German language
17 years professional translation
German · French · Spanish · Italian · English
Cornell University Press
Springer Nature
Chicago area
An editor who inhabits your intellectual world
I’m William McJunkin, an academic editor and translator based in the Chicago area. I hold a PhD in German language and literary studies and have spent the better part of my professional life working at the intersection of language, thought, and meaning — first as a university instructor, then as a professional translator, and now as an academic editor specializing in the theory-driven humanities and social sciences.
My path to academic editing is not the typical one, and I think that matters. Before focusing on editing, I spent 17 years as a full-time freelance translator, working across German, French, Spanish, Italian, and English in fields ranging from business and technology to marketing and finance. That work gave me something unusual: a deep, practical understanding of how meaning moves — and sometimes breaks — between languages, registers, and intellectual traditions. Translation is an act of interpretation as much as transcription, and the best translators are also the best readers. That sensibility is at the core of everything I do as an editor.
Work Philosophy
The challenge for a scholar writing in English as a second or third language is not simply grammatical. It is the deeper question of how to carry an argument shaped in one linguistic and intellectual tradition into a discourse community with different rhetorical expectations, different conventions of scholarly voice, and different assumptions about what needs to be said and what can be left implicit.
This is the problem I am most distinctively equipped to help with. My academic formation in Continental philosophy, critical theory, and German literary and intellectual history means I engage with my clients’ work from inside their tradition rather than from outside it. When a scholar working in the wake of Foucault, Derrida, Habermas, or Bourdieu brings me a manuscript, I understand not just the language but the intellectual stakes — what the argument is doing, what it is responding to, and what an anglophone reader will need in order to follow and be persuaded by it.
My clients work across continental philosophy, critical theory, cultural and media studies, intellectual history, literary theory, sociology and anthropology with strong theoretical framing, and related fields. They have published with Cornell University Press, Springer Nature, and leading peer-reviewed journals. I work with them at every stage of the publication process: from early developmental feedback on structure and argument, through careful line and language editing, to final proofreading before submission.
I also bring a sustained interest in the intersection of language and technology — including the implications of large language models for scholarly writing, research production, and the future of the humanities. This informs both my editorial practice and my broader thinking about what it means to write seriously in an age of AI.
If you are a scholar preparing work for English-language publication and you want a collaborator who will engage seriously with your ideas as well as your prose, I would be glad to hear from you.