Her research focuses mainly on classical Arabic and Persian literature, and she has also done research on Ottoman Turkish and modern Arabic and Persian literature. Her first book investigates the medieval Arabic and Persian patronage of poetry as a flexible form of social order. It argues that patronage contributed to the development of a new kind of professional identity that in many ways transcended more limited forms of identity based on ethnicity, religious affiliation, and socioeconomic status. Her current research investigates leisure and pleasure pastimes as an approach to politics and the development of new forms of Arabic literature in the 9th-11th centuries. She teaches mainly in the Comparative Literature Department, regularly teaches in the Arabic Program (housed in Classics), and occasionally teaches in the Middle East/South Asian Studies Program.