I am chair of the School of Humanities and Director of the Purchase Writers Center. I teach literature and participate in the interdisciplinary gender studies program. My current project is a book, working title: British Lives, about contemporary autobiography and self-portraiture in Britain. In 2009, I curated the exhibition British Subjects: Identity and Self-Fashioning 1967–2009 at the Neuberger Museum of Art.

I have taught at Purchase since 1980. In 1997, I won the SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching. I was appointed as Kempner Distinguished Professor of Literature in 2006.