She received her Ph.D. in Japanese Language and Literature from University of California, Berkeley in 1991. Since 2004, she has translated several works by authors such as Nakagami Kenji and Fujii Shōzō into English. Her first book, Under an Imperial Sun: Japanese Colonial Literature of the South, was published in 2003 and has been translated into Japanese and Chinese. From 2009 to 2010, a Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad Fellowship allowed research that culminated in her second book, In Transit: The Formation of the Colonial East Asian Cultural Sphere, which was published in 2014.