Her work addresses a range of topics including race, gender, religion and media studies.
[5] She has been a visiting professor at the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta and at Northwestern University.
[5][8] In the early 2000s and 2010s, Frederick was Assistant Professor of Religion and African-American Studies at Harvard University.
[14] Frederick's first book Between Sundays: Black Women and Everyday Struggles of Faith (University of California Press, 2003), an ethnography of black church women in Halifax County, North Carolina, was praised by reviewers; the review in Contemporary Sociology described it as a work that "puts a human face on so many sociological concepts and categories.
[18][8] In 2016, Frederick co-authored Televised Redemption: Black Religious Media and Racial Empowerment with Carolyn Moxey Rouse and John L. Jackson Jr.[19]