Her research centers on American immigration and ethnic history, with an emphasis on the Asian American experience. Her first book, Race, Religion, and Civil Rights: Asian Students on the West Coast, 1900-1968 (Rutgers University Press, 2015), and her second book, A Different Shade of Justice: Asian American Civil Rights in the South (UNC Press, 2017), both look at how Asian Americans experienced racism and discrimination in the U.S. and later contributed to movements for political rights. She is currently at work on her third book, Wages of War: Japanese American Incarceration and Forced Labor during World War II, which approaches the history of Japanese American internment as a history of prison labor.