She obtained her Ph.D. from the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City in 2005, specializing in Victorian literature and postcolonial theory. In her book, Victorian Narrative Technologies in the Middle East (Routledge, 2008), she considers the novel, alongside roads and canals, as one of the technologies of imperialism. She is currently working on a book manuscript about the ways that the novel, travel narrative, and biography together engineered techniques of development in England and in the colonies during the nineteenth century.