She works on root concepts that structure the humanities, including history, modernity, religion, reason, the West, and the global, and on problems common to the disciplines in both the humanities and the social sciences. She is the author of Spinoza’s Revelation: Religion, Democracy, and Reason (Cambridge, 2004) and Powers of Distinction: On Religion and Modernity (Chicago, 2017), and her current research is on the motif of the end of metaphysics.