She obtained her PhD from the University of Minnesota in 1992 and that same year she began working at the University of Mary Washington, where she currently works as a Professor. From the perspective of a social historian, she taught various courses in the History of Spain and Latin America and the History of Women and Gender. Her latest book, Gendered Crossings: Women and Migration in the Spanish Empire (2016), was awarded the Best Book Prize of 2016 by the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women. She has written many articles, chapters of books and monographs, including Women and Authority in Early Modern Spain: The Peasants of Galicia (Oxford, 2005), which in 2006 obtained the Roland H. Bainton Prize for being the best book in Modern History. That same year, she co-authored Women and Gender in the Western Past with Katherine French, Houghton-Mifflin. In 2013 she coedited the book entitled The Ashgate Research Companion to Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, published in Ashgate in 2013. Throughout her research career, she has benefited from several scholarships awarded by various organizations, such as the National Endowment for the Humanities (2000), the Rutgers Centre for Historical Analysis (2004), the ACLS / NEH/SSRC International and Area Studies Fellowship (2007), and the John Carter Brown Library (2011). She was a member of the executive committee of the Sixteenth Century Society, of the executive board of the Society for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies, and President of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women. She is currently co-editor of the Early Modern Women journal: An Interdisciplinary Journal.

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8410-8614