Annebella served as Executive Committee Member and a Trustee of the Design History Society, 2012-15. This involved a number of responsibilities including peer-reviewing funding applications and chairing conference panels (National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, India, 2013; University of Oxford, 2014; California College of the Arts, San Francisco, 2015). She had particular responsibility for the annual international Design History Society Essay Prize, which rewards excellence in undergraduate and postgraduate student work. 

Annebella co-founded the University of Brighton Postgraduate Design History Society with MA and PhD student colleagues in 2005, which continues to thrive with new members annually. In 2016 the society celebrated its tenth annual symposium with a celebratory publication, to which Annebella contributed the opening essay.

As a result of a decade teaching Historical and Critical Studies to student practitioners, Annebella developed a research interest in the role of history and theory teaching in an art school environment. This initially developed out of a postgraduate qualification in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education; the research was then presented as a paper in a Design History Society panel at the Design Research Society conference in Oslo in 2013. A later development appeared in print as 'My position in the Design World: Locating Subjectivity in the Design Curriculum', Design and Culture, 2015. On the basis of this work, Annebella was invited to give a keynote lecture on critical studies in the art school at Glasgow School of Art in 2015.

At the University of Brighton, Annebella has contributed to a range of institutional projects on the subject of design history, including as Assistant Director of the Internationalising Design History research cluster in 2016-17, where she helped develop a successful bid to develop the cluster into a Centre of Research Excellence. From 2017-2020, she serves on the management board of the Centre for Design History.