She received her Ph.D. in comparative literature, with specialization in classical philology, from Harvard University. She is trained as a classicist and a comparatist; her research focuses on the material culture of writing in the ancient world, and on other intersections between literary and cultural history in Greece and Rome. She is currently finishing her first book, Alphabetic Order: The Roman Alphabet and the Material Culture of Literature in the Ancient World (under contract, Harvard UP). Before joining the Literature faculty at MIT, she taught Classics at the College of the Holy Cross and at Harvard University.