[3] As an assistant professor, she accepted an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellowship to research The Company of Strangers: Immigration and Citizenship in Interwar France.
[3] During her early years at the school, Lewis published her first book titled The Boundaries of the Republic: Migrant Rights and the Limits of Universalism in France, 1918-1940, which was the co-winner of the 2008 James Willard Hurst Prize.
She discovered that although France established Europe's first guest worker program, their policies championed inequality and let to economic and political hardships for immigrants.
[8] She published her second book in 2013 titled Divided Rule: Sovereignty and Empire in French Tunisia, 1881-1938 through the University of California Press.
[9] Two years later, she accepted an ACLS Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowships for Recently Tenured Scholars to research The First French Decolonization: A New History of Nineteenth-Century Empire.