Teaching and research interests include contemporary mindfulness, poetics, Shakespeare, digital humanities, comparative religion, and philosophy. Freinkel's current book project explores themes from the history of philosophy and the history of optics, and is entitled Reflections on the Precious Mirror.

Publications include Reading Shakespeare's Will: The Theology of Figure from Augustine to the Sonnets (Columbia, 2002) and numerous articles on a broad range of topics from fetishism to usury and early modern encounters with Buddhist Asia. Her writings address authors as diverse as Shakespeare, Dante, Luther, Kant, and the 13th-century Japanese monk Dogen Zenji.