Hirsch is the author of "In the Moment of Greatest Calamity: Terrorism, Grief and a Victim's Quest for Justice," a personal account of her experiences during the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombing in Tanzania, the loss of her husband as a victim of the attack and the subsequent trial of four defendants.

Her previous book, “Pronouncing and Persevering: Gender and the Discourses of Disputing in an African Islamic Court,” is an ethnographic analysis of how gender relations are negotiated through marital disputes heard in Kenyan Islamic courts. Fluent in the Swahili language, she has conducted extensive fieldwork in Kenya and Tanzania since 1985, supported by a Fulbright Fellowship, the National Science Foundation, Wesleyan University, and Duke University, and she has held residential fellowships at the National Humanities Center, the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress (Rockefeller Fellowship), the American Bar Foundation, and Northwestern University’s Law and Social Science Program.