She wrote Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety , a ground breaking theoretical work on transvestitism's contribution to culture. Other works include Sex and Real Estate: Why We Love Houses, Academic Instincts , Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life, Shakespeare After All, and Dog Love (which is not primarily about bestiality, except for one chapter titled "Sex and the Single Dog").
Her book Shakespeare After All (Pantheon, 2004) was chosen one of Newsweek's ten best nonfiction books of the year, and was awarded the 2005 Christian Gauss Book Award from Phi Beta Kappa.
She was educated at Swarthmore College (B.A., 1966; L.H.D., 2004) and Yale University (Ph.D., 1969). Formerly the director of Harvard's Humanities Center, she is now the chair of its department of Visual and Environmental Studies and director of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts.
She continues to teach courses on Shakespeare and on modern culture in the department of English and American Literature and Language.