Between 2007 and 2018, she held the position of Clinton Rossiter Professor of American Institutions, Department of Government, Cornell University.

[1] Since 2018, she serves as the John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions in the Government Department at Cornell.

She feels there is a distinctiveness of the APD approach,[4] which studies "the causes, nature, and consequences of key transformative periods and central patterns in American political history,"[5] as well the "durable shifts in governing authority" in the United States.

Bill and the Making of the Greatest Generation, 2005 (Oxford University Press), and Dividing Citizens: Gender and Federalism in New Deal Public Policy, 1998 (Cornell University Press), which also won the Greenstone Book Prize[11] and the Martha Dertick Book Award.

[12] Other books include The Government-Citizen Disconnect (Russell Sage 2018); Degrees of Inequality: How The Politics of Higher Education Sabotaged the American Dream (Basic Books 2014); The Submerged State: How Invisible Government Programs Undermine American Democracy (University of Chicago 2011); and Four Threats: The Recurring Crises of American Democracy (St. Martin’s Press, 2020), co-authored with Robert C. Lieberman.