Professor Swidler has engaged in influential work on culture, religion, and American society, including the now-classic article, “Culture in Action,” Organization Without Authority (1979), and Talk of Love: How Culture Matters (Chicago, 2001). She is co-author of Habits of the Heart, The Good Society, and Inequality by Design. She has won teaching awards at both Stanford and Berkeley and has been a Guggenheim Fellow, French-American Foundation Professor of American Civilization, Fellow of the Successful Societies Program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She teaches and writes about the sociology of religion, including recent work on competition over models of the sacred among chiefs, NGOs, and religious congregations in sub-Saharan Africa.