Her interests focus on media history, technology studies, communication law, and conceptions of emotion in the public sphere. Her articles in these areas appear in journals such as Media Culture & Society and Critical Studies in Media Culture. Her first book, Murder, Media, and the Politics of Public Feeling (Indiana University Press, 2011), explores the emotional mediation of and legal responses to two of the most publicly visible and commented upon hate crimes of the late 1990s. Using textual analysis of media and legal texts as well as interviews with activists and lawmakers, the book analyzes the ways that media texts encouraged and conveyed feelings about the men and their murders, and traces how these feelings became the grounds for local political action and the eventual passage of hate crimes laws.