Lee researches issues concerning the indigenous people of Botswana and Namibia, particularly their ecology and history.
With Irven DeVore, Lee was co-organiser of the 1966 University of Chicago Symposium on "Man the Hunter".
[1] Lee co-edited with Richard Daly The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunter-Gatherers, which was first published in 1999.
In 2003, Anthropologica, the journal of the Canadian Anthropology Society, dedicated an issue to Lee's oeuvre.
In 2011 he co-authored the children's book Africans Thought of It: Amazing Innovations with Bathseba Opini.