Having completed a BA in sociology and philosophy at the
Australian National University in 1982, Lynette Spillman received her
MA in 1986 and PhD in 1991 from the
University of California-Berkeley, both in sociology. Her doctoral dissertation at Berkeley was titled:
Recognition, Integration and the Mobilization of National Identity: Centennials and Bicentennials in the United States and Australia. It later became her first book:
Nation and commemoration: creating national identities in the United States and Australia. In 1983 she received a
Fulbright award and in 2001 she was a recipient of the
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. In 2014, Spillman was a keynote speaker at Yale's
Center for Cultural Sociology special conference on
"Advancing Cultural Sociology". ==Contributions to political sociology==