She is a professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and the former president of the Celtic Studies Association of North America.
She lived in her grandmother's house in Cleveland, Ohio at a time and place where "it was assumed that most people spoke at least two languages", and has said that this upbringing strongly influenced her view of translation.
[6] She earned a bachelor's degree at Radcliffe College in 1965, majoring in Romance languages with a minor in biochemistry.
Her dissertation, The Personal Names in the Ulster Sagas: A Tool for Understanding the Development of the Cycle, was supervised by John V.
Tracy (1995) supports her thesis as unsurprising, pointing to Joyce's later use of Irish texts in Finnegans Wake.