She received her PhD (2010) in History from Stanford University. Her research centers on how cross-cultural interactions and relationships shaped both indigenous and colonial societies in the lowlands of South America. She is the author of Amazonian Routes: Indigenous Mobility and Colonial Communities in Northern Brazil (Stanford University Press, 2014). Her current book project focuses on autonomous indigenous groups in northern and western Brazil and their contacts with Luso-Brazilians over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.