She is the author of Sugar and Civilization: American Empire and the Cultural Politics of Sweetness, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2015, winner of the Myrna Bernath book prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. She earned her Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University in 2010, and holds an M.S. in Nutrition Science and Policy from Tufts University. Her current research explores the environmental aspects of the war on drugs in twentieth-century United States and Latin America.