She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University in 2007 and taught at Kenyon College before coming to Northeastern. She has held the Barbara Thom Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Huntington Library, and in 2012-2013 she was a fellow at the Wellesley Newhouse Center for the Humanities. Professor Boeckeler is completing a book, Playfull Letters: The Dramatization of the Alphabet in the Renaissance, which demonstrates the intellectual impact of artistic experimentation with the alphabet during the Renaissance. Among her publications are the article “Painting Writing in Albrecht Dürer’s Self-Portrait of 1500,” which appeared in the journal Word and Image in 2012.