She completed her doctorate in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and has also taught at Harvard University. She co-edited a volume of new critical essays on the work of Pedro Almodóvar (with Brad Epps, University of Minnesota Press, 2009), and has published articles on race and melodrama in action and disaster films, on robots and cyborgs, and on the military role of the pin-up in WWII. Her book on the figure of the artificial person in literature and film is forthcoming from Rutgers University Press.