Amanda Cachia

Project Background

Amanda Cachia is a curator and professor whose work approaches art history and museum practice through the lenses of disability, accessibility, and social justice. Since 2010 she has curated twenty exhibitions focusing on disabled artists, and she has now published three academic books on topics related to disability studies, contemporary art, and medicine.

While preparing the second of these, Hospital Aesthetics: Disability, Medicine, Activism (2025), Amanda learned that she would need to produce the index independently of her publisher. Having previously worked with Flatpage for other academic editing services for first book and a line edit of the current manuscript, she reached out to see if we could assist with academic book indexing.

I chose to work with Flatpage because of our prior successful collaboration and their demonstrated ability to engage deeply with complex, specialized subject matter. Indexing a book situated at the intersection of disability studies, contemporary art, and medical humanities required more than technical skill—it required intellectual sensitivity and conceptual understanding. Flatpage brought both, along with a clear familiarity with academic publishing standards.

Amanda Cachia, PhD

The Collaboration

The author approached Flatpage for indexing services on her book focusing on disabled artists who investigate the experience of illness in ways that move outside clinical conceptions of treatment and the conventional medical understanding of disability. The text presents this kind of work as both an aesthetic intervention and a critical mode of activism. 

The publisher of Hospital Aesthetics, Manchester University Press, has strict guidelines governing the formatting and, more importantly, the length of the index. As a result, Cachia and the indexer on the project needed to work together to find flexible solutions that would accommodate the publisher’s requirements while still serving the needs of the book itself—all within a fairly tight timeline of about three weeks.

As part of Flatpage’s indexing service, the author filled out a form to provide more details about the kind of index she needed and the publisher’s requirements. Once the parameters were set, our professional indexer got to work.

The best part of working with Flatpage was the collaborative and thoughtful approach to problem-solving. The indexer was attentive not only to the publisher’s strict length and formatting requirements but also to the conceptual integrity of the book. Their knowledge of disability advocacy was invaluable, and they exceeded my expectations by finding creative ways to balance accessibility, precision, and concision under a tight deadline.

Crucially, the indexer herself has a special interest in disability advocacy, which made her an excellent fit for this project. This perspective informed the indexer’s understanding of the book, allowing her to review the text strategically and help develop an approach that would keep the index within the publisher’s length limits while also making sure everything that needed to be covered was listed. 

The Outcome

Flatpage is an ideal partner for scholars working with complex, interdisciplinary material. They combine editorial rigor with genuine care for the subject matter, communicate clearly throughout the process, and deliver work that meets both authorial and publisher expectations. I would especially recommend them to authors who need an indexer capable of engaging critically with specialized fields rather than treating indexing as a purely mechanical task.

The book’s index was produced on time and to the publisher’s specifications. Hospital Aesthetics was published by Manchester University Press in September 2025.