Her research focuses on social performance, comprising everything from comedy to funeral rites. She is best known for her study of gendered speech in Roman comedy and its cultural implications, Feminine Discourse in Roman Comedy: On Echoes and Voices (Oxford, 2008). In July 2011 she is visiting the University of Melbourne as the keynote speaker at the conference ‘Text, Illustration, Revival: Ancient Drama from late Antiquity to 1550’.