Author of The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter, 1995. Co-winner of the American Culture/Popular Culture Association's 1996 Emily Toth Award. "Roseanne: Unruly Woman as Domestic Goddess," Screen 31.4 (1990). Other articles in The Journal of Film and Video, Jump Cut, The Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Genders, and various anthologies in the areas of film studies, television studies, cultural studies, comedy and feminism. In progress: Unruly Girls: Changing Media for the 21st Century, a study of the teenage girl as a site of conflicting contemporary discourses around gender, the family and new forms of media.

Interests include film studies and cultural studies, with an emphasis on film history, genre studies, and feminist theory.