She received her Ph.D. in English from Duke University and her B.A. (hons.) in Anthropology and English from New York University. Her research and teaching focus on nineteenth-century American literary and cultural studies, the history of science, affect studies, as well as critical theories and histories of race, gender, and disability. She is currently completing a book project, With Feeling: The Senses and Social Life in Nineteenth-Century America, that brings together the philosophical, scientific, and materialist histories of sense perception to understand how the five senses - taste, touch, sight, sound, and smell - functioned in the era of Jim Crow: at once a regulatory structure that enforced scientific classifications of human difference and an emotional force for altering that structure.