She received her BA from Brown University and her MA and PhD from Cornell University. She has been affiliated with Georgetown University since 2004 and was previously affiliated with Hamilton College. Her articles have appeared in publications such as GLQ, Arizona Quarterly, and American Literature as well as in numerous edited volumes. She received honorable mention in the competition for the Crompton-Noll Award for her article “Coming Around Again: The Queer Momentum of Far From Heaven.” Her current projects include a study of queer spectrality in nineteenth-century American culture entitled “Unfamiliar”; a collection of original essays on film and video entitled “Queer Textures of Attachment”; and a collection of new scholarship in American literary studies on the long nineteenth century, coedited with Ivy Wilson, entitled “Unauthorized States.”