She earned her Ph.D. at Northwestern University (1998), her M.A. at Leicester University in the U.K., and her B.A. at The George Washington University. She is best known for her research on how the public’s shared memory of events is created and maintained through mass media. In her book, Troubled Pasts: News and the Collective Memory of Social Unrest (2006), she studied whether shared memories of 1960s social protests had evolved. In more recent work, she has explored how shared memory affects news coverage of current events and examined its potential to influence political decision making. Her work has appeared in a variety of communication, journalism, and political science journals including: Journal of Communication, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, American Journal of Political Science,andJournal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media.