She received her Ph.D. in English at the University of Texas at Austin. She specializes in race, gender, and sexuality in North America. Her first book, In the Neighborhood: Women’s Publication in Early America (University of Massachusetts Press, forthcoming), identifies a continuum of publication practices—including print, material culture, manuscript, and performance—via which early American women rearranged communal relations. More broadly, her research considers the articulation of natural commodities, material culture, labor, and book history in order to examine what is American about the early American book.