She has published five books and many journal articles, as well as book chapters and encyclopedia entries; and won several major writing awards, including the University of Chicago's Ronald S. Crane Award and Snowday Memorial Prize for Criticism, and Northwestern University's Tri-Quarterly Prize. Her A Portrait of the Student as a Young Wolf: Motivating Undergraduates was nominated for a Frederick W. Ness Book Award, and Dream Revisionaries: Genre and Gender in Women's Utopian Fiction 1870-1920 was a finalist for the Woodrow Wilson Foundation's Rosenhaupt Book Award and earned her a Litt.D. from Wilson College in Pennsylvania. She has been a featured and/or plenary presenter at several professional conferences in the United States and Europe.