She has taught at Rice, Indiana, Vanderbilt, and the University of Virginia. She is the author of five books (one of them edited and coauthored), about fifty scholarly articles, and hundreds of other articles and reviews. Her books and articles have been translated into Polish, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Russian, Italian, Croatian, Czech, Hungarian, and Chinese. She has published scholarly articles in Slavic Review, Slavic and European Journal, Modern Age, Teksty Drugie and other periodicals, and has done consulting work for the National Endowment for the Humanities, U.S. Department of Education, and other institutions and foundations. She is Editor of Sarmatian Review, an academic tri-quarterly on non-Germanic Central and Eastern Europe. Her area of specialization is Central and Eastern Europe.