Her research interests encompass a wide range of topics in Spanish American history, including the law, childhood and youth, intellectual history, gender, slavery and ethnohistory. In recent years, she has explored the history of Mexico City and Oaxaca, as well as Spanish history, especially the rural region around the city of Toledo. She is the author of Children of the Father King: Youth, Authority and Legal Minority in Colonial Lima (UNC, 2005) and, most recently, The Enlightenment on Trial: Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire (Oxford, 2017), as well as over a dozen articles and book chapters on colonial Spanish America appearing in journals including The Hispanic American Historical Review, Slavery and Abolition, and The William and Mary Quarterly. Her work has been supported the NEH, the ACLS, and the National Science Foundation.