She earned a B.A. in English and American Language and Literature from Harvard University and a Master’s of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School before completing the Ph.D. in Boston University's American and New England Studies Program. Her essays have appeared in Studies in the Novel, Modern Drama, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly and elsewhere. She is currently completing a book manuscript titled Places for Dead Bodies: Blackness, Labor and Detection in American Literature, which links the emergence and development of the detective fiction genre to anxieties about interracial sociability in the world of work, and beginning research on a project at the intersection of working-class studies and religious studies, which will use historical case studies to suggest new ways of understanding how communities respond to religious events.