Dr. Garofalo's scholarship explores the intersections between the environmental humanities, empire, and gender and sexuality. Her areas of expertise include eco- and material feminisms, queer ecology, posthumanism, and feminist science studies. Threaded throughout her work on late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literatures are the histories of sex, sexuality, and sexology. She is particularly interested in the ways these infrastructures are (for better or worse) around us still.

Questions of gender and sexuality cut across all areas of her work. Her current book project includes two chapters focused exclusively on women writers (Phillis Wheatley and Elizabeth Barrett Browning). Those chapters closely consider the intersections of race and sex/uality. A third chapter from the book, on Tennyson, considers forms of queer ecological relation. The book, as a whole, interrogates nineteenth-century white colonial masculinity, the binary logics through which is is concretized, etc.