Ann Swidler (born December 11, 1944) is an American sociologist and professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.
[3] She began studies at Radcliffe College (at the time, the women’s part of Harvard University) in the fall of 1962.
Her advisor was Arlie Hochschild, and was also mentored by Robert N. Bellah, Reinhard Bendix, and Neil Smelser.
[5][6] Habits of the Heart (1985), co-authored with Robert Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, and Steven M. Tipton, was finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 1986,[7] won the Los Angeles Times Book Award in 1985 and received Highest Honors for a Book in Education from the American Educational Studies Association.
In a review in the American Journal of Sociology, sociologist Michèle Lamont describes the book as "theoretically ambitious" as it "propose[s] nothing less than the reconceptualization of the role that culture plays in organizing social action.