Her research focuses on the intersection of gender, race, and age in the nineteenth-century United States. She is the author of The Struggle for Equal Adulthood: Gender, Race, Age, and the Fight for Citizenship in Antebellum America, which was published in 2014 by University of North Carolina Press, Gender and American Culture series. With Nick Syrett, she is co-editor of Age in America: Colonial Era to the Present, published by New York University Press in 2015.