She is a graduate of Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges, holds a PhD Yale University, and is the recipient of fellowships from numerous institutions, including the Frick Center for the History of Collecting, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She is the author of Thomas Eakins: Art, Medicine, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (2007), Lessons from China: America in the Hearts and Minds of the World’s Most Important Rising Generation (2013), and Lust on Trial: Censorship and the Rise of American Obscenity in the Age of Anthony Comstock (2018).