She received her B.A. in American Literature and Culture, with a minor in Chicana/o Studies, from UCLA and her M.A. and Ph.D. in English from UC Santa Barbara. She is currently working on converting her dissertation into a manuscript that will examine the co-constitutive relationship between U.S. national identity and Chicana/o racialized identity via the site of the U.S.-Mexico border. Her essay, "Raced Bodies, Corporeal Texts: Narratives of Home and Self in Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street," will be included in the forthcoming collection _Virginia Woolf and 20th-Century Women Writers_ (November 2014).