She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana in 1997. She is a Faculty Advisory Board member of UCONN's Institute of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies for 2010-2011. Her essays on comparative narrative and cultural theory of the Americas have appeared in various journals including Meridians: Feminism, Transitionalism, Activism; Narrative; and CR: The New Centennial Review. Her book, Gender and Allegory in Transamerican Fiction and Performance, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2008. She writes and teaches on topics related to hemispheric perspectives on U.S. and Latin American culture and literature.