She is a cultural and intellectual historian, focusing on the long-durée development of ideas and the recovery of classical thought in the Italian Renaissance, with a particular interest in radical thought, science, religion, and atheism. Her forthcoming book, Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance (Fall 2014), is based on her PhD dissertation (Harvard University, 2009), written under the supervision of James Hankins. Her latest project uses Renaissance biographies of classical philosophers to expose how humanists imagined the lives and roles of the ancient sages whom they themselves sought to imitate.