She received her PhD in Rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley. Her current book project, Negative Theatrics: Writing the Postdramatic Stage, traces a series of modernist and contemporary writers for whom theater offers the chance to contest the value of the present as such. Her article “Mouthing Off: the negativity of monologue in Mac Wellman’s A Murder of Crows” is forthcoming in Modern Drama (57.3); “Absence Pleasures: Whiteness, Death, and Music in American Psycho” appeared in Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture 11.1. She is also a playwright and director; her play Grimly Handsome won the 2013 OBIE Award for Best New American Play.