Garrett completed her PhD with Honors in 1999 at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York City, during which she was also a Fulbright fellow at Tel Aviv University.

In the same year, she was appointed as an assistant professor at the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Denver, Colorado, and served there in this position until 2008.

[2] In the same year, she took up a post at Monash University, Melbourne Australia as a research professor for Contemporary Jewish culture.

In 2013 Garrett was appointed as the Deputy Head of the Australian Center for Jewish Civilization at Monash University.

The most prominent are her four sole-authored books: Garrett also was the sole editor of The Cross and Other Jewish Stories: New Yiddish Library Series by Lamed Shapiro (Yale University Press: 2007).