Her research centers upon conceptualizations of race, citizenship, empire, and transnational identity in nineteenth-century Latin American and U.S. Latino/a literature. Her current book project, Between Two Empires: Spanishness, Whiteness, and Transnational Collaboration in Greater Mexico, examines how nineteenth-century Mexican and Mexican American writers negotiated and strategically employed discourses of Spanishness, whiteness, hemispheric solidarity, and modernization in an attempt to foster the building of transnational coalitions and political as well as intellectual communities with Anglo Americans.