She received her B.A. in Visual Arts from Brown University and her Ph.D. in Visual and Cultural Studies from the University of Rochester. Her research and teaching interests include topics in the areas of film studies, cultural studies, and Asian American studies, such as the emergence of cinema during the "age of empire," race and ethnicity in U.S. film, cinema and Asian Pacific American culture, and globalization and culture. Her essay Travels to Asia and the Pacific in Early Cinema appears in the anthology Re/collecting Early Asian America: Readings in Cultural History. She is currently working on a book-length manuscript about travel, exoticism, and cinema from high imperialism to global culture tentatively titled Fictions of Faraway Places.