She earned her Ph.D. degree from Duke University and her research explores themes of television, digital media, capitalism, labor, and gender in contemporary Japan. Her first book, Scripted Affects, Branded Selves: Television, Subjectivity, and Capitalism in 1990s Japan, analyzes the development of a new genre of primetime serials, the "trendy drama." The book argues that the trendy drama represents a shift in television production from producing story-based entertainment to offering lifestyle-oriented programming. It claims that television professionals capitalized on the semantic fluidity of the notion of lifestyle to reunite viewers into new collectivities that, in turn, helped them sublimate pervasive anxieties over the demise of mass middle-class society.