Her research focuses on cross-cultural encounters in the early modern Mediterranean and race and religion in early modern English drama. Her publications reinforce her research investments in dialogue and exchange and in linking early modern concerns about race and identity to contemporary ones. Her recent work on Othello, “The Moor of America,” claims that Shakespeare’s Othello presents anxieties about political belonging that recur in the discourse surrounding the presidential campaign of Barack Obama. She has also previously published articles on Othello and the Ottoman Empire (2014) and on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters (2014).