She graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a Bachelor of Arts in English and a concentration in Asian American studies from Cornell University. She received her doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley where she completed a dissertation on conceptualizing the field of early Asian American literature. She is currently developing her work into a book that examines Asian American racial formation at the intersections of modernism, regionalism, and the proliferation of the little magazine culture at the turn of the twentieth century. She also currently has articles under consideration by the Journal of Asian American Studies, Amerasia journal, and MELUS.