Her research explores the interplay between sexuality, power, and performance in early modern Italy; past projects have investigated the construction of masculinity in sixteenth-century invectives targeting prostitutes, erudite intertextuality in a play by the Venetian cittadina writer Moderata Fonte, and the self-fashioning of the poet and courtesan Veronica Franco. Her recent book, Textual Masculinity and the Exchange of Women in Renaissance Venice (University of Toronto Press, 2015) examines how male poets consolidated and publicized their homosocial bonds through the exchange of fictional female bodies.