She specializes in early Chinese literature, and recently published Savage Exchange: Han Imperialism, Chinese Literary Style, and the Economic Imagination (Harvard 2014). She is currently working on two book projects relating to the Silk Road: one on changes in literary and economic practices during the rise of the Silk Road (ca. 1-700 CE), and a comparative study of the modern idea of a more globalized premodernity (the "invention" of the Silk Road).