She received her BA from the Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium) and her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. She has previously held fellowships at the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas in Austin and the Centre for Global Cooperation research at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Her first book, Authentically African: Arts and the Transnational Politics of Congolese Culture will appear in the "New African Histories" Series at the Ohio University Press.