Professor Boudreau's research in literature, culture, and education is unified by broad concerns for justice, inclusion, and social progress. Her literary scholarship considers the ways literature helps to advance social progress and justice, while her educational research investigates educational environments and works to develop pedagogies and content that open STEM education to broader populations by bringing the humanities and arts to scientific and technical subjects.

Her expertise in project-based learning includes guiding students to bring literary analysis to wider audiences and in new forms: a family narrative of covid in the same neighborhood where the Combahee Women's Collective first theorized intersectionality; a code-based "choose-your-own-adventure" using text from a Toni Morrison novel to demonstrate the extent to which skin color was (and was not) deterministic in early colonial days; a literary analysis of Namibia's first novel to help WPI students understand colonialism and resistance in a country where they do their interdisciplinary projects. She has also advised student projects that led to campus and community improvements, such as a student-run bike-share program at WPI; revisions to New Student Orientation to support introverts; and hands-on, integrative STEAM assignments now used in local middle schools and in WPI's Chemical Engineering curriculum.