Her research focuses on key episodes and experiments in the history of the human and behavioral sciences. Her most recent book, Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity examines attempts between 1942 and 1963 to map the elusive and subjective parts of the human psyche via once-futuristic data-storage techniques. In looking at innovations in data-gathering methods, her research investigates the ongoing transformation of knowledge, technology, and subjectivity in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Currently, she is at work on a history of coercive interrogation in relation to brainwashing.