She was trained in an interdisciplinary program, receiving a PhD in Anthropology and History from the University of Michigan. Her specialty is the history of French empire in South Asia and the Indian Ocean. Currently she is completing a book manuscript titled "The Nayiniyappa Affair: Commerce, Conversion, and a Colonial Scandal in French India," which explores the fraught intersection of trade and religion in the eighteenth-century French colony of Pondichéry, India. Her research has been supported by a Bourse Chateaubriand, the American Philosophical Society, and the Council for European Studies, and has appeared in the journals Eighteenth-Century Studies and French Historical Studies.