She received her Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Berkeley, and she is a historian of modern Europe, focusing on the Russian empire and the Soviet Union. She is the author of several articles and the recent book The War Within: Diaries of the Leningrad Blockade (Harvard University Press, 2017). Her current book project, under contract with Harvard University Press, is titled Dear Unknown Friend: Soviet and American Women Discover the Power of the Personal. It examines the early Cold War through thousands of letters exchanged between women of the U.S. and USSR in which they advocated for peace and women's rights in the face of McCarthyism and Stalinist repression.