Her research centers on cultural and religious history in Spain and the larger early modern Spanish world, from the Mediterranean to the Americas and beyond. She is currently at work on a book on the 1655 theft of the bones of San Juan de Mata, founder of the Order of the Most Holy Trinity for the Redemption of Captives, and the problem of relic identity and authentication in early modern Catholicism. Her previous book, From Muslim to Christian Granada: Inventing a City’s Past in Early Modern Spain (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), examined the crafting of civic identity in connection with the lead books of the Sacromonte, a collection of bogus relics and accompanying forged documents that were discovered in Granada, Spain, in the late sixteenth century.