She held positions at University of California, Riverside and University of North Florida before joining the ASU faculty in 2010. She earned her BA in Liberal Arts from Webster University and has an MA in Religion from the University of Chicago. She received her PhD from the Claremont Graduate University in Los Angeles. Her areas of research are Religion and Colonialism; Early Modern Christianity in Latin America; and Religion and Science Fiction. She is the author of Work Useful to Religion and the Humanities: A History of the Development of the Comparative Method in Religion from Bartolomé Las Casas to Edward Burnett Tylor. Pickwick Studies in the History of Religion, Eugene: Pickwick Publications, (2012) and has published articles in the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History and Implicit Religion.