She received her M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies and her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Michigan. She has studied and conducted research in Jordan, Morocco, Israel, Palestine and Syria, and her work examining the relationships between states and oppositions has appeared in Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Middle Eastern Studies and other volumes. She is currently working on a second manuscript, Linking Domestic and International Conflict: The Case of Middle East Rivalries, with Paul Huth at the University of Michigan.