Callaway received dual doctoral degrees at Harvard and the Institut d’Histoire de la Révolution Française at the University of Paris through a Co-tutelle Internationale de Thèse.
Her innovative book manuscript studies the transformation of property in the French Revolution using five different methodological approaches over the course of five chapters, moving through legal, political, administrative, social/anthropological, and economic histories. She shows the way that property as a political right was added on to an array of existing relationships facilitated by property, relationships that were themselves in the midst of evolution in the dynamic context of eighteenth-century France. Challenging the existing view of property rights as the solid foundation of a liberal democratic order, she reveals the conflict and complexity at heart of this concept. The project reopens the French Revolution as a fertile ground to consider how and why we got the democratic orders that we did.
Callaway's second project pursues the intersection of democratic and capitalist culture from the perspective of the social bonds that depend on property