Her research is concentrated in two overlapping areas: first, the roles and activities of women in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism; and, secondly, the organization of religious life in the history of South India up to the late medieval period, including the examination of institutional structures, religious authority and social hierarchy, ritual forms and ritual performers, and the physical space in which social and ritual dynamics transpired, with a particular focus on the interactions among religious communities. She is the author of a number of articles in these fields, Donors, Devotees and Daughters of God: Temple Women in Medieval Tamilnadu (2000), and a book in progress on the sociology of the medieval South Indian temple.