She received her Ph.D. from Brown University in 1990. Her central interests include: gender studies and feminist theory; the body; theories of subjectivity; British and European Modernism; fin de siecle literature; critical and cultural theory; and theories of mass culture. She is the author of Eye on the Flesh: Fashions of Masculinity in the Early Twentieth Century (1996); a translation of the book Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State, by Antonio Negri (2009); and various articles on Masculinity, Walter Benjamin, and James Joyce.