Janet Ravenscroft
Writer, editor, academic
BACKGROUND
Skills
Publishing​​
Publishing
​1985 - 2010
I trained as a journalist but decided that this career was not for me when the only options available were covering council meetings for the local press, waxing lyrical about lipstick for a woman's mag, or working for a trade magazine, such as The Pig Breeders' Gazette.
Eventually I found my way into publishing, and spent the next two decades commissioning and editing illustrated books on non-fiction subjects such as gardening, home decor and crafts for the likes of Little, Brown, Headline and the packager, Breslich & Foss.
It was while working in publishing that I studied for my degrees in English and History at Birkbeck College, the University of London's only specialist provider of evening education.
* Editor and author of non-fiction for books and magazines
* Writing fiction as Jan Ellis
* Marketing and sales for the book trade
* Academic writing and speaking
Languages
* French (fluent)
* Spanish (pretty good)
* Italian (great when I'm there)
Education
Birkbeck College, University of London
​1984 - 2010
Ten years after studying for a BA in English Literature at Birkbeck College,
I returned to take an MA in Renaissance Studies and, later, a PhD in Early Modern Spanish Art and Culture. My thesis was entitled ‘Invisible friends: questioning the representation of the court dwarf in Hapsburg Spain’.
Academia
Academic writing
My most recent piece of academic writing was 'Dwarfs and Kings at the Spanish Hapsburg Court: Images and Living Bodies' in Dis/ability History der Vormoderne, Ein Handbuch/ Premodern Dis/ability History, A Companion (Didymos-Verlag, Affalterbach 2017) compiled by the Homo-Debilis research group, of which I am a member.
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I also have a chapter entitled 'Dwarfs – and a "Loca" – as Ladies’ Maids at the Spanish Habsburg Courts' in The Politics of Female Households: Ladies-in-waiting across early modern Europe (Brill, 2013).
An edited version of my MA dissertation was published as ‘Invisible friends: questioning the representation of the court dwarf in Hapsburg Spain’ in Histories of the Normal and the Abnormal: Social and cultural histories of norms and normativity, ed by Waltraud Ernst (part of the series Routledge Studies in the Social History of Medicine) (Oxford: Routledge, 2006; first paperback edition 2012).
As well as academic texts, I have also written articles about disability and the family of Philip II of Spain for the best-selling History Today magazine. (See 'Projects' for other work.) I also review history titles for them.
Lecturing
I have spoken widely about the Spanish court dwarfs and issues around early modern conceptualisations of dis/ability at conferences in the UK and the US. I also give occasional talks on subjects as varied as 'monsters and marvels' and childhood to general-interest groups.
Teaching
I teach short courses on the art and culture of early modern Spain and the Low Countries, both for the Workers' Educational Association (WEA). I have been a guest lecturer at Birkbeck for the Golden Age Spain module of the MA in Renaissance Studies, which I enjoyed very much.
Words and pictures
Freelance editorial and design
​2010 - present
I am the deputy editor of Historic Gardens Review, the magazine of the campaigning Historic Gardens Foundation. I also do structural editing for a small number of fiction and non fiction writers. (Contact me for details.)
Sales and Marketing
Along with all the commissioning, I was responsible for the sale of foreign rights for the book packager Breslich & Foss Ltd for a decade. I now take care of marketing for Batch, the part of the Booksellers' Association (BA) that moves money and electronic data between bookshops and suppliers as cost-effectively as possible.