She received her Ph.D. from Duke University (1994). Her recent publications include Suspect Relations: Sex, Race, and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), and "The Imperial Gaze: Native American, African American, and Colonial Women in European Eyes," The Blackwell Companion to American Women's History (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 2002). Her first book explores gender, sexuality, and the construction of racial ideologies in early America. She is currently writing a book on deism and the quest for a rational religion in the early Republic.