She holds a BA in English and History from Trinity College Dublin, where she also completed a PhD on modern Irish poetry. She was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Scholarship to Harvard University and has since published widely on women poets from Ireland, Britain and America. Her critical anthology, Poetry by Women in Ireland 1870–1970, published by Liverpool University Press in 2012, includes more than 180 poems by fifteen women of the period, demonstrating the range of their achievement and the lasting value of their work. Her most recent book is a monograph, Contemporary Irish Women Poets: Memory and Estrangement (Liverpool, 2015).