Lima is the director of the Comparative Literature program and the Co-Coordinator of Black Studies at SUNY Geneseo. Her research and teaching focus on Black Atlantic Writing. In the spring of 2015, Lima created and taught the first course on "Black Lives Matter" at Geneseo. In the fall of 2019, she taught “Black Humanities: the 1619 Project” for the first time. Some of Lima’s publications include “The Politics of Teaching Black and British” in Black British Writing (Palgrave), “A Written Song: Andrea Levy’s Neo-Slave Narrative” in Entertext, and “The Choice of Opera for a Revisionist History: Joan Anim-Addo’s Imoinda as a Neo-Slave Narrative,” in Transcultural Roots Uprising. With Miriam Alves, she translated and co-edited a bilingual anthology of fiction by Afro-Brazilian women, Women Righting/Mulheres Escrevendo. Lima co-edited (with Joan Anim-Addo, Goldsmiths) a two-volume special issue of Callaloo on contemporary neo-slave narratives.