Lee-Ann is an award-winning historian and researcher. Her research interests include the histories of mental health, disability, and work.

These interests intersected in her first book Attending Madness: At Work in the Australian Colonial Asylum (Amsterdam-New York, NY, Rodopi, 2008), published in the series Clio Medica: The Wellcome Series in the History of Medicine. A social and cultural history of asylum work and workers in colonial Australia, it considers not only who attendants were and why they worked in the asylum, but how they and others understood what it was to be a "good" attendant.

Lee-Ann was awarded an Australian Research Council (ARC) Post-doctoral Fellowship (Industry) as part of an ARC-Linkage Project at La Trobe to research the history of Kew Cottages, Australia's first purpose-built institution for people with intellectual disabilities. Her co-authored book Failed Ambitions: Kew Cottages and Changing Ideas of Intellectual Disabilities (Melbourne, Monash University Publishing, 2023), won a 2023 Australian Society of Archivists Mander-Jones Award for best publication.

She is now researching the history of disability and work in Australia.

Lee-Ann has worked as a researcher on ARC Discovery and Linkage grants investigating the history of mental health in Australia; Museum Victoria's Psychiatric Services Collection; maritime unions and internationalism; and the history of women and non-traditional work.