Her research interests include theories of shame, trauma, and depression; auto/pathography (particularly narratives of mental illness); and women's life writing. With Joseph Adamson she has co-edited Scenes of Shame: Psychoanalysis, Shame, and Writing (SUNY Press, 1998), contributing a chapter on shame and reparation in Anne Sexton's poetry. She has also published on Melanie Klein's unpublished life writing in "Autobiography, Mourning and Reparation: The Case of Melanie Klein," a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 15.2 (2000). Forthcoming work includes a personal essay on living with depression in the academy, and an article on rhetorical strategies in two women's narratives of psychiatric hospitalization.