Professor Ruttenburg's research interests lie at the intersection of political, religious, and literary expression in colonial through antebellum America and nineteenth-century Russia. Related interests include history of the novel, novel theory, and the global novel; philosophy of religion and ethics; and problems of comparative method, especially as they pertain to North American literature and history. She is currently writing a book about the history and meanings of conscience in life and in literature and has recently written on the work of J. M. Coetzee ("Elizabeth Costello") and Melville ("Bartleby").

Ruttenburg, current director of Stanford's Center for the Study of the Novel, is notable for her comparative and interdisciplinary approach: her work-in-progress, a book provisionally entitled Dostoevsky And, will serve as a lens through which to illuminate some of the key themes of the literature of American modernity. These include self-making and self-loss; sentimentalism and sadism in abolitionist fiction; crime and masculinity; and the intersection of race with religious fundamentalism and radical politics.

In Dostoevsky's Democracy, published in 2008, Ruttenburg presented an alternative view of the Russian writer's decade as an exile in Siberia. Through his encounters with common Russians in labor camps, she argues, Dosteovsky experienced an "intense artistic meditation" on Russian "democratism," as he called it, which played an integral role in shaping Russian modernity during the ensuing period of peasant emancipation.

Ruttenburg is also the author of Democratic Personality: Popular Voice and the Trial of American Authorship, in which she constructed a genealogy of democratic personality in America beginning with the Salem witchcraft crisis of 1962 through to the Great Awakening and the antebellum era. Tracing how colonial culture forsook Puritan cosmology to embrace the representational potential of the individual, the author chronicles how democratic personality crucially influenced the rise of a national literature in the United States.

The courses she teaches draw heavily from this set of interests. Having received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Stanford in 1988, Ruttenburg has taught at Harvard, UC Berkeley and New York University, where she served as Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature from 2002-2008.

She has also previously served as President of the Charles Brockden Brown Society and has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Humanities Center Fellowship, a University of California President's Research Fellowship, as well as fellowships from the Social Science Research Council for Russian and East European Studies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council for Learned Societies.