Sullivan is the Department Chair and Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University Bloomington as well as Affiliate Professor of Law in the Maurer School of Law at the same institution. She holds both a J.D. and a PhD. from the University of Chicago and is the author of Paying the Words Extra: Religious Discourse in the Supreme Court of the United States (Harvard 1994),The Impossibility of Religious Freedom (Princeton 2005), andPrison Religion: Faith-Based Reform and the Constitution (Princeton 2009).