Professor Green-Barteet has two primary research areas: 19th-century U.S. literature written by women and contemporary young adult literature. She is most interested in the ways in which women and girls resist and transgress societal and familial expectations. She has published on Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Wilson, Sarah Pogson, and Laura Ingalls Wilder as well as young adult dystopian fiction. She has published on perceptions of space in the works of Harriet Jacobs and Harriet Wilson; violence and femininity in the works of Sarah Pogson; race, gender, and rebellion in The Hunger Games trilogy; and non-normative girlhood in YA speculative fiction. 

Along with Prof. Alyssa MacLean, she is co-investigator on The Black Londoners Project, a digital humanities project that recovers the histories of formerly enslaved individuals who fled the US and settled in London, Canada West in the mid-nineteenth century. The Black Londoners is a SSHRC funded project.