Amy received her B.A. (Hons.) degree in criminology and her M.A. in sociology, specializing in criminology, from the University of Windsor, and her Ph.D. in sociology from Michigan State University . She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada. Her areas of interest and specialization include animal studies, criminology, gender, environmental sociology, and research methods.

Amy's master's thesis was an analysis of the connection between animal abuse and other forms of family violence in the lives of twenty-six women whom she interviewed over a period of eight months. She has published a book describing her research on the relationship between animal abuse and family violence, entitled Animal Abuse and Family Violence: Researching the Interrelationships of Abusive Power (The Edwin Mellen Press, 2005). Her doctoral dissertation examined the effects of slaughterhouses on community crime rates utilizing data from six secondary sources obtained for all of the non-metropolitan counties in states in the US with ‘right-to-work' laws (a total of 581 counties) annually from 1994 through 2002. Pooled time series cross section techniques were used to analyze the data using both OLS and negative binomial regression.

Amy has also published refereed articles on the visual displays of hunted animals (Visual Studies, 2003), the interconnectedness of women, animals, and weapons in the sport hunting discourse (Society & Animals, 2004), the use of various feminist perspectives to examine the increasing participation of women in sport hunting (Women's Studies Quarterly , 2005), and the state of the research and theorizing of environmental values (Annual Review of Environment and Natural Resources , 2005). She also assisted in creating an extensive bibliography of literature on animals and society, which was published in Human Ecology Review (2004, 11(1): 75-99) and co-edited an anthology with Linda Kalof, The Animals Reader: The Essential Classic and Contemporary Writings, which brings together, introduces, and synthesizes the critical historical and contemporary readings on the interrelationships between humans and non-human animals (Berg, 2007).