She received her Ph.D. in History from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She specializes in women’s/gender history, U.S. history, the history of labor and capitalism, and oral history theory and method. Her work has been published by Southern Spaces and in North Carolina Women, Their Lives and Times (UGA Press). Her public history work includes: research and fieldwork for the Southern Oral History Program; research and editing for the Smithsonian’s Civil Rights History Project; appearances on North Carolina Public Radio; and documentary work (as interviewee and consultant). She is working on her manuscript, The Many Norma Raes, which examines women’s leadership in the campaign to unionize the J.P. Stevens textile mills, a multi-faceted struggle for workers’ rights that connected the labor, women’s, civil rights, and occupational health and safety movements in the 1970s.