Before joining Syracuse, she taught on the faculties of Brown and Harvard Universities, and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has spent many years in India doing field research, with a focus on village expressive culture in the state of Jharkhand over a twenty-five year period. Her publications have appeared in the journal Asian Music and in the books Women's Voices Across Musical Worlds, Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives on Field Research in Ethnomusicology, Comparative Musicology and the Anthropology of Music, Ethnomusicology and Modern Music History, and The Western Impact on World Music. She is currently completing a monograph about the role of Mundari music history and performance in the autonomy movement that resulted in Jharkhand statehood in 2000.