Lily Sheehan’s research and teaching interests are in twentieth and twenty-first century Anglophone literatures and cultures (especially the U.S. and U.K.), feminist and queer theory, visual and material culture, critical fashion studies, periodical studies, affect studies, and studies of race and ethnicity. Her current projects include an edited book on fashion and literature for Cambridge University Press's Critical Concept Series, a monograph about how texts and textiles shaped conceptions of peace during the Cold War, and an article about the whisper network as a method of navigating gender-based violence. She is also co-editor of the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies.

Her previous monograph, Modernism à la Mode: Fashion and the Ends of Literature (Cornell University Press 2018), argues that fashion describes the limits and possibilities for modernist aesthetic and political transformation, which continue to shape accounts of the uses of literature and literary criticism. Sheehan co-edited Cultures of Femininity in Modern Fashion (University of New Hampshire Press 2011), an interdisciplinary collection of essays that explores how fashion shaped ideas and experiences of femininity in Europe and North America from 1850 to 1940. In addition, she has published essays on topics including Black internationalism and beauty culture, fashion magazines and periodicity, avant-garde dress design and the Nobel Prize, and writers including Virginia Woolf, Jessie Fauset, and W.E.B. Du Bois in Modern Fiction Studies, Modernism/Modernity Print Plus, ASAP/J, the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and a number of edited collections.