Lea is Professor in Political Theory at the London School of Economics and Adjunct Associate Professor in Philosophy at the Australian National University. Her research centres on issues of global justice, normative political theory as well as the philosophy of the Enlightenment. She is the author of "The Meaning of Partisanship" (2016) and "Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency" (2011). Her latest book "Free", a philosophical memoir about growing up in communist Albania and the transition to liberalism, will be published in October 2021. More recently, she has been working on a new project "What is political progress?" funded through a Philip Leverhulme Prize.

At THE NEW INSTITUTE Lea was involved in the program The Future of Democracy.