Her research focuses on the topics of the judicial decisions on gender in the Middle Ages and how medieval law and religion influenced legal outcomes.
She was a part of Boston University's College of Arts & Sciences and originally was interested in becoming an opera singer before switching her focus to history.
[1] While working on her Ph.D., she spent one summer traveling across France to search through church records alongside her interests in gender, marriage, and legal decisions.
[2] In 2020, McDougall acted as the Norman Freehling Visiting Professor for the University of Michigan's Institute for the Humanities.
Her research project for that semester was titled "Surviving Illicit Pregnancy in Medieval Christian France".