She received her B.A. (1997) from Mt. Holyoke College, and her M.A. (2001) and Ph.D. (2004) in History and Humanities from Stanford University under the mentorship of Norman Naimark. She has been teaching at Cornell since 2004. Her book, entitled Between States: The Transylvanian Question and the European Idea during World War II, was published by Stanford University Press in 2009. She also co-edited with Norman Naimark Yugoslavia and Its Historians: Understanding the Balkan Wars of the 1990s (Stanford University Press, 2003). Her research and teaching are focused on the modern history of East-Central Europe, ideas of Europe and European statehood, the politics of violence, and the intersection between social policy and geopolitics in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe.