She received her Ph.D. in History from Princeton University after conducting research abroad on a Fulbright-Hays fellowship. As the recipient of a Marshall scholarship from the British government, she earned an M.Phil. degree in Modern Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Durham in England. She also earned a B.A. in Anthropology, summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, from Yale University. Before joining the Penn faculty in 2002, she taught at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Trinity College in Connecticut. In 2011 she won the Charles Ludwig Distinguished Teaching Award from the School of Arts and Sciences of the University of Pennsylvania. In 2012-2013 she was a Visiting Professor in Paris at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in the Institut d’Études de l’Islam et des Sociétés du Monde Musulman (IISMM).