After an award-winning 20-plus year career in journalism, in which she worked for the Chicago Tribune, Bloomberg News, and the Los Angles Times, among other organizations, she earned a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2012. She is the author of They Came to Toil: Newspaper Representations of Mexicans and Immigrants in the Great Depression (University of Texas Press, 2018), which examines the way English- and Spanish-language newspapers framed immigration. The book is a significant expansion of her dissertation, which won the American Journalism Historians Association’s Margaret A. Blanchard Prize for the outstanding doctoral dissertation in media history in 2013.