Her reserach interests are in colonial legal history, state formation, translation and textual practice. Her first book, Document Raj: Scribes and Writing in Early Colonial South India (Chicago University Press 2012 and Permanent Black, India, 2015), studied the ways in which colonial paperwork reorganized orientation to writing in Southern India's Tamil speaking region. Her research is on colonial frontier jurisdictions in South and South East Asia. Her research has been supported by Social Science Research Council and the American Institute of Indian Studies.