Michele is professor and chair of sociology at the University of New Hampshire. Her publications include In the Course of a Lifetime: Tracing Religious Belief, Practice, and Change (co-author Paul Wink; University of California Press, 2007), Catholic Identity: Balancing Reason, Faith, and Power (Cambridge University Press, 1999), Debating Divorce: Moral Conflict in Ireland (University Press of Kentucky, 1993), Handbook of the Sociology of Religion (editor; Cambridge University Press, 2003), Introduction to Sociological Theory (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), and over fifty research articles, essays and book chapters. Dr. Dillon is the current President of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. She has also served as Chair of the American Sociological Association section on the sociology of religion, and as President of the Association for the Sociology of Religion. In 2011-2012, she was the JE and Lillian Byrne Tipton Distinguished Visiting Professor in Catholic Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.