Prior to this appointment she was a Scholar-in-Residence fellow in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at Carleton College and a Christian A. Johnson Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at Vassar College. She received her doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley Department of Anthropology in 2011. An archaeologist by training, her current research interests include the archaeology of colonialism, community and public archaeology, Indigenous and feminist archaeology, and historical archaeology.