Her dissertation was entitled: "Renaissance revivals: the continuing interaction between culture and society," and her advisors were Ann Swidler and Harrison C. White.
Griswold's first publication was "American character and the American novel: An expansion of reflection theory in the sociology of literature" published in the American Journal of Sociology in 1981, and she published her dissertation as a book in 1986 as Renaissance revivals: City comedy and revenge tragedy in the London theatre, 1576-1980.
In her dissertation and subsequent book, Griswold first put forth the "cultural diamond" which Gary Alan Fine considered "Perhaps the central conceptual model within the sociology of culture approach.
[6] Ultimately, Griswold's work contributed heavily to the "production of culture" perspective pioneered by Richard A. Peterson (a student of Alvin Gouldner) as well as Paul Dimaggio, a member of Griswold's Harvard cohort.
This approach considers the social organization of the situations in which cultural products (like literature, art, music, etc...) are produced, and the ways in which such social organization structures the cultural output.