<p>Paul Lichterman’s specialty areas include culture, religion, civic organizations and social movements, politics, qualitative methodology, and theory. His first book, The Search for Political Community (Cambridge University Press, 1996), investigated different styles of grassroots environmentalism in the U.S., their strengths and drawbacks. His second book, Elusive Togetherness: Church Groups Trying to Bridge America’s Divisions (Princeton University Press, 2005), compares the ways that nine religiously sponsored community service groups tried to reach out to other community organizations and low-income people and build new social ties in the wake of welfare policy reforms. A lot of Paul’s research asks how people practice active citizenship and define public issues in a socially unequal, culturally diverse society. Paul also theorizes how culture shapes action in everyday life, and how people in turn use culture, and he writes on the logic of qualitative research. Paul has won Best Article awards twice from the ASA’s Section on Sociology of Culture, for work in American Journal of Sociology and Theory and Society; the book Elusive Togetherness won the Distinguished Book Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, the Distinguished Scholarship Award of the Pacific Sociological Association, and Honorable Mention from ASA’s Section on Sociology of Culture. His work is translated into French, Dutch, and Italian. With grants from National Science Foundation and the Spencer Foundation, Paul is studying the different ways that public organizations define and act on housing issues and homelessness. The study involves an innovative combination of methodologies including ethnography and network analysis, and ultimately will include a cross-national comparison.</p>