She earned her undergraduate degree in philosophy from Yale University and her PhD in sociology from Columbia University. Before joining Hunter College, she taught at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor for thirteen years. Her first book, Backstage at the Revolution, a history of the Paris Opera under the Old Regime, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2008. In the 2015-2016 academic year, she was a Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and in the summer of 2016 she was a Mellon Visiting Scholar at the New York Botanical Garden, where she conducted some of the research for her new book, American Eden.