She received her B.A. in 1994 from Rice University, finished her Ph.D. in 2004 at Boston University, and taught in the History and Literature program at Harvard University from 2004-07. Her research focuses on democratic and religious thought, including Asian influences, Romantic ideas, the role of science, and the culture of American intellectual life. At Princeton, Kittelstrom will finish her first book, The Religion of Democracy: Liberals and Self-Culture in Evolutionary America, 1838-1912, which locates an origin of modern political liberalism in nineteenth-century religious liberalism, in which figures from William Ellery Channing through William James to Jane Addams used the concept of self-culture to redefine first religion and then the relationship of the self to society.