Her career included various appointments in five prestigious universities, and numerous fellowships and awards. Her lecture classes through 2011 included three courses of Early American history, and she co-taught "Riots, Strikes and Conspiracies in American History" with urban historian Robert M. Fogelson. Maier chaired a university-wide committee at MIT in 1985 to re-organize its humanities schools and broaden and structure its programs. Its adopted recommendations expanded women's studies, awarded specific area degrees, and initiated a doctoral program collaborating history and anthropology under Dean Ann Fetter Friedlaender. MIT's faculty voted Maier the Killian Award in 1998, given annually to one senior faculty member for outstanding achievement. The recipient presents on their professional activities over their Lecturer year. In 1976, she became a member of the American Antiquarian Society. An offprint of its proceedings featured her "Boston and New York in the 18th Century" (1982). In the 1990s, Maier was a charter member of "The Historical Society" group among American Historical Association membership who were concerned about restrictive 'political correctness' and collegial civility. Maier was elected as an American Academy of Arts and Sciences “History Fellow” in 1998. In 2010, Maier became one of two women honorary members of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts since 1947. Maier was the 2011 President of the Society of American Historians (SAH), an affiliate of the American Historical Association. It is dedicated to literary distinction in history and biography. The society's past presidents include Allan Nevins, Eric Foner, James M. McPherson, and David McCullough. In 2012, President Obama appointed Maier to the James Madison Memorial Fellowship Foundation Board of Trustees. The foundation was created by Congress in 1986 as part of the bicentennial celebration of the Constitution and offers $24,000 graduate-level fellowships to secondary teachers to undertake a master's degree which emphasizes the study of the Constitution.jamesmadison.gov  Maier's writing is characterized as serious and unadorned, with a crossover appeal from scholars to intelligent readers who enjoy a well-told story of well-researched scholarly history. In "Ratification", Maier attributed her storytelling ability to Barbara Tuchman's insight that the writer can build suspense by never acknowledging a development until the characters in the narrative could know it. Professionally, her research-writing technique was self-described as looking for something comparative to come up with new questions. For example, in "American Scripture", she found over 90 local declarations and then compared them to that of the Second Continental Congress.