She is the author of many publications, including "These United States: A Nation in the Making 1890 to Present" (2015), "Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920" (1996), and "Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950" (2008).
She taught high school history in South Carolina for several years and held managerial positions in private industry before returning to school to graduate from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte with an M.A., and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a Ph.D. She studied at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University.
[1] She taught history at Queens University of Charlotte in Charlotte, North Carolina before joining Yale University as an assistant professor in 1994, full professor of history in 1998, and Peter V. & C. Vann Woodward Professor of History in 2001.
In 2015 she published, with Thomas Sugrue, a synthetic reinterpretation of society and politics in twentieth century America.
She is married to noted Cambodian genocide scholar Ben Kiernan.