She completed her PhD at the University of Sheffield where she also held a part-time Teaching Fellowship for three years. Her thesis examined the work of writers such as Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, Gertrude Stein, Fannie Hurst and Zora Neale Hurston in terms of literature, consumerism and the articulation of female identity. Current projects involve working on a monograph based on her thesis, and on a new research project based on contemporary literary and cultural responses to the American Civil War.