She received her Ph.D. in U.S. history from Johns Hopkins University, and specializes in the study of Catholicism in modern U.S. history and culture, within a transnational and imperial perspective. In 2012/13, she was the recipient of a one-year Fulbright Junior Lectureship in Germany, and has received grants from the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at Notre Dame and the Huntington Library. In October 2013, her article “Catholicism and the Making of the U.S. Pacific” appeared in the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and she is currently completing a book entitled Imagining God’s Country: Catholicism, Nation, Empire, and the Making of Modern America, 1870-1920.