Her areas of interest and teaching include Pre-Civil War American literature and culture, African-American literature, and the history of print culture. A 2008-09 John W. Kluge Center Fellow at the Library of Congress and a 2005-06 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, she is now working on a second book, on African-American radical writing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Essays from her research and teaching have appeared in ESQ, Poe Studies, the Modern Language Association volume Approaches to Teaching Poe's Poetry and Prose, and the Routledge Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography.