She graduated with her PhD in History, focusing on Southeastern Europe. Her dissertation, Nihil Sine Carbo, explores the way that modernity was negotiated and constructed in the Jiu Valley of the Carpathian Mountains with respect to labor, ethnicity and state policies of industrialization. She holds an M.A. from the Central European University; her thesis looked at how the interwar Romanian Orthodox Church and the Iron Guard drew from a common discourse on nationality, Orthodoxy and minorities. She recently published (with co-author James Frusetta) the article “Interwar Fascism and the Post-1989 Radical Right: Ideology, Opportunism and Historical Legacy in Bulgaria and Romania” in Studies in Post-Communism. In 2007, she was a Dorot Fellow at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Research in Washington D.C.