Lyndall Ryan was Professor of Australian Studies at University of Newcastle in 2003 and in 2011 was an Honorary Conjoint Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Newcastle. She had previously worked at ANU, Griffith University, and Flinders University.
Ryan published widely on massacre on the colonial frontiers in New South Wales and Tasmania. In 2012, she published Tasmanian Aborigines: A History Since 1803. In 2017, she launched the first stage of an online digital map of frontier massacres in Eastern Australia from 1788 to 1872.