She received an MA in Italian from Middlebury College and her BA in Classical Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. At MICA, she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses, including surveys of contemporary art as well as more focused topical classes on the art and architecture of totalitarian regimes, visual culture and the holocaust, contemporary portraiture, postwar Italian cinema, curatorial studies, and professional practices. Hirsh is also the coordinator for the graduate concentration in critical 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, appeared with Ashgate Publishing (2011). Her essays on artists such as Giorgio de Chirico, Jean-Luc Godard and Roberto Rossellini, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Neysa Grassi, Michael Huey, Giorgio Morandi, Pipo Nguyen-Duy, Yinka Shonibare, and Regina Silveira have appeared in scholarly volumes, academic journals, and museum catalogues, and she served as general editor for the catalogue Philagrafika 2010: The Graphic Unconscious. She is currently co-curating Invisible City: Philadelphia and the Vernacular Avant-garde, an exhibition scheduled to open in January 2020. 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).