She received her B.A. from Washington University in St. Louis and her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. Her first book, Imagining a Greater Germany: Republican Nationalism and the Idea of Anschluss, was published by Cornell University Press in 2016. It was awarded the Hans Rosenberg Prize by the Central European History Society for the best book published in 2016 and the 2017 Radomír Luža Prize by Center Austria and the American Friends of the Documentation Center of Austrian Resistance for outstanding publication on Central European studies in the era of the Second World War.