She is a social cultural anthropologist (B.A from UC Berkeley and MA and PhD from Columbia University). Having lived in Iran through the 1979 Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), her scholarship is deeply impacted by those lived experiences. Her work revolves around questions of revolution, state, violence, mass incarceration, imprisonment, memory, mourning and memorialization, with a significant focus on women and gender. She has also written on language, metaphor, embodied performances, and commemorative rituals. She is the author of awards winning book, Ghosts of Revolution: Rekindled Memories of Imprisonment in Iran.