She received her D.Phil. in Oriental studies from the University of Oxford, and held postdoctoral fellowships at Göttingen and Harvard. Her particular interests are in reading the Old Testament through its early Jewish and early Christian interpretation, and in material aspects of the reception of biblical texts. Her first book was The Story of Israel in the Book of Qohelet: Ecclesiastes as Cultural Memory (Oxford University Press, 2012); she is now working on a study of the Additions to Daniel in the history of interpretation. Before Duke, she taught at Amherst College and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.