She received her PhD in ethnomusicology from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 2002. Her research and teaching interests include American popular music, the mass media, the American musical theater, sexuality and gender, aesthetics, and the postwar cultural history of New York City. She has published articles on the relationship between gender stereotypes and rock radio programming, the economic development of the Broadway musical in the 1980s and 1990s, the reception of rock musicals, and New York’s commercial theater scene in the 1960s and 1970s. She is author of the book The Theater Will Rock: A History of the Rock Musical, From Hair to Hedwig, which was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2006, and Hard Times: The Adult Musical in 1970s New York City, which was published by Oxford University Press in 2012.