Her work focuses on colonial Latin American social and legal history with an emphasis on African-descended people in Mexico. She is currently a long-term fellow at the Huntington Library completing a book project titled The Capital of Free Women: Race, Status, and Economic Networks in Colonial Veracruz, which challenges traditional narratives of racial hierarchies and gendered mobility by focusing on African-descended women and their experiences in Mexico’s understudied period from 1580 to 1730.