She received her PhD from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2009. Her dissertation is entitled Performing Embodied Histories: Colonialism, Gender, and Okinawa in Modern Japan. In 2005–2006, Barske was awarded a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship to conduct research as a Foreign Visiting Scholar at the University of the Ryukyus in Okinawa, Japan. As a Blakemore Foundation Fellow at the Stanford Inter-University Center for Intensive Japanese Studies in Yokohama 2001–2002, she had the distinct honour of working with Kodama Kiyoko, studying Okinawan dance traditions and researching embodied archives of performance with the Tokyo Okinawa Performing Arts Preservation Society.