To date, her research in early American history has focused primarily on the communities and peoples of the eighteenth-century Pennsylvania backcountry with particular emphasis on the Scots-Irish. She is the author of A Town In-Between: Carlisle, Pennsylvania and the Early Mid-Atlantic Interior (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), winner of the Philip Klein Prize from the Pennsylvania Historical Association, and the forthcoming The Scots-Irish of Early Pennsylvania (to be published by Temple University Press for the Pennsylvania Historical Association in 2017). Her current research project, “Clothing the Babel,” is exploring how the material culture of ethnic identity in the eighteenth-century mid-Atlantic served as one model for the negotiation of pluralism in early America.