She earned her B.A. from the College of William and Mary and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. Her work focuses on antebellum southern commercial culture. Dr. Mushal is a contributor to The Field of Honor: Essays on Southern Character and American Identity and The Southern Middle Class in the Long Nineteenth Century. Her current project examines the early development of R.G. Dun & Company, a commercial credit reporting firm whose surviving records document the mid-nineteenth-century activities of businesses throughout the United States.