She teaches, researches, and writes in the areas of gender and women's history, consumption, critical food studies, and capitalism. She is the author of Building a Housewife's Paradise: Gender, Government, and American Grocery Stores, 1919–1968 (2010), winner of the Association for the Study of Food and Society's book prize. She has also published essays on the uses of women's history and women's labor in contemporary local food discourses. Her current research uses Julia Child's biography to study the emergence of food as a crucial object in middle-class life in the mid-twentieth-century United States. She is also pursuing research on the history of the abstraction of consumer demand in economic thought.