Lia is an associate professor and Vice Chancellor's Principal Research and Impact Fellow in the Institute for Sustainable Industries and Liveable Cities (ISILC). Her internationally-recognised and interdisciplinary research attends to the myriad ways in which communities make sense of legacies of state violence and protracted conflict. She has pursued these themes through research on topics including transitional justice, everyday social repair, gender justice, the politics of memory, the unsettling impacts of dead and missing bodies, and wounded landscapes. Lia's work is grounded in long-term ethnographic and empirical research in Timor-Leste (since 2004) however she has extended her research interests to Aceh (Indonesia), Sri Lanka, and to work with First Nations communities in Australia impacted by settler colonial violence. Her research aims to centre vernacular knowledge and amplify grassroots political and reparative strategies. She also seeks to bring rich empirical insights into conversation with broader scholarly debates. 

Lia has two sole-authored monographs, seven co-edited books, and numerous publications in high-ranking journals and edited books. Her recent publications include her monograph, The Unruly Dead: Spirits, Memory and State Formation in Timor-Leste (University of Wisconsin Press, 2024), and a special issue of Death Studies (2025) on the theme of Transformations and Transitions: the social and political life of dead bodies (with Jessica Auchter and Caroline Bennett).  Lia is on the editorial board of the journal Peace Studies, a member of the expert panel for the International Commission on Missing Persons, and a convener of the Afterlives research network Home - Afterlives Research.

Lia is currently supervising two PhD students as principal supervisor and three students as associate supervisor.