She holds a Ph.D. in modern and contemporary art from the History of Art Department at Bryn Mawr College, where she also earned an MA in art of the Italian Renaissance. She received her BA in Classical Studies from the University of Pennsylvania and an MA in Italian from Middlebury College. At MICA, she teaches courses on the art and architecture of totalitarian regimes, visual culture and the holocaust, notions of modernism, contemporary portraiture, film studies, and curatorial studies. She is currently completing Speculations: On the Art and Writing of Giorgio de Chirico, a monograph focused on the artist's pictorial and literary self-representation, and her volume Contemporary Art and Classical Myth, co-edited with Isabelle Wallace, recently appeared with Ashgate Publishing (2011). Her essays on Giorgio de Chirico, Giorgio Morandi, Jean-Luc Godard and Roberto Rossellini, Pipo Nguyen-Duy, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Yinka Shonibare, Regina Silveira, and Michael Huey have appeared in scholarly volumes, academic journals, and museum catalogues, and she served as general editor for the catalogue Philagrafika 2010: The Graphic Unconscious. Hirsh has held fellowships from the U.S. Fulbright commission to Italy and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and, prior to teaching at MICA, she was a visiting assistant professor at Oberlin College (2003-2005) and a postdoctoral fellow at both Princeton (2005-2006) and Colombia Universities (fall 2006).