After graduating from LSU in 2002, Shelley went on to study folklore and literature at the University of Missouri, where she received her PhD in 2011. Her major research interests include folklore and cultural theory, twentieth-century American literature, southern literature, and critical race theory. She has published on issues of race, folklore, and the novel, and is currently at work on a project titled Ethnographic Fictions: Studies of Folklore and Race in American Literary Culture. In her time at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, she has taught undergraduate and graduate course in folklore and literature, exploring such topics as food and food culture, the American gothic, popular culture, and the literature of Louisiana.