Her primary research interest is in Chinese gender history. Her first book, Between Birth and Death: Female Infanticide in Nineteenth-Century China (Stanford UP, 2014), examines significant differences between Chinese and Western perspectives on the practice. Her latest research project focuses on the life and career of Taiwan's noted cookbook author and television celebrity, Fu Pei-mei, as a way to understand changes in postwar society, including the development of foodways as a critical national political project, shifting gender roles, and the transnational construction of identity through successive generations.