She is interested in how and why new genres and forms of literature and texts are born in response to specific social and political circumstances. Her most recent book The Barber of Damascus: Nouveau Literacy in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Levant (Stanford University Press, 2013; Turkish and Arabic translations, 2018) is about a phenomenon of the writing of history by commoners and non-scholars in 18th-century Ottoman Syria, with a special focus on the life and work of a barber, Ibn Budayr.