She holds a Ph.D. in Russian literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has worked as a conference-level interpreter for the U.S. Department of State, including at arms-control talks between American and Soviet officials in the late '80s and early '90s. She has published a book on Dostoevsky—Dostoevsky's Secrets: Reading Against the Grain (2009)—and has another book forthcoming, The New Russian Dostoevsky: Readings for the Twenty-First Century.