Her research focuses on U.S. political institutions and state development, with an emphasis on the growth and fortification of American empire, mass suburbanization & urban gentrification, and the rise of expansive U.S. prison complex. Her first book, The American Warfare State: The Domestic Politics of Military Spending (University of Chicago Press, 2014), examines the development and persistence of a permanent U.S. military complex and growth in presidential power to launch military actions. She is currently working on a second book project examining how state interventions shaped the racial and spatial dimensions of poverty, violence and incarceration in post-World War II American society.