She received her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. Her fields of interest are theatre and performance theory, intercultural theatre, and literatures of ethnic minorities and diasporic communities. She is the author of The Orient of the Boulevards: Exoticism, Empire and 19th-Century French Theatre (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998) and is working on a second book which examines non-traditional casting practices in relation to theories of individual and collective cultural identity.