​Her book, Subversive Voices: Eroticizing the Other in William Faulkner and Toni Morrison, examines identity and race via the theory of Jacques Lacan and cultural studies and was awarded the Toni Morrison Society book prize.  It was a finalist for the MLA award for best first book, 2003.  Her book, Race, Trauma, and Home in the Novels of Toni Morrison, is an interdisciplinary study of trauma in Morrison’s fiction and was published in 2010.  It was awarded the Toni Morrison Society Book Prize and was nominated for the MLA William Sanders Scarborough Prize for an outstanding scholarly study of black American literature or culture, 2011. Her third book, Healing Trauma: The Power of Listening (2018), is an edited collection of essays on trauma by neuroscientists, psychoanalysts, and academics and was nominated for the Gradiva Award for best edited book, 2018, for the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis.  Her research applies Lacanian and other psychoanalytic principles of identity/subjectivity/agency, trauma theory, cultural studies, and neuroscience to literary texts, with articles on Morrison, Faulkner, Pinter, trauma, stream-of-consciousness, psychoanalytic theory, cultural studies, and multicultural issues.  She teaches a special course on race, identity, and trauma in Toni Morrison and William Faulkner and a course focused on contemporary theater called “What’s New About New Plays?”  As a trained educator at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, she works with groups from the FBI, ICE, State Department, state law enforcement, and schools.