She specializes in early American and eighteenth-century transatlantic literature and culture. Her first book, The Science of the Soul in Colonial New England (2011) was awarded the Brewer Prize of the American Society of Church History. She is currently completing a book on Unscripted America: the Origins of a Literary Nation, under contract with Oxford University Press. Rivett is also writing The New Cambridge Introduction to the Literature of Early America. Additionally, she has co-edited a volume of essays on Religious Transformations in the Early Modern Americas (2014).