There are several reasons to be interested in conformal field theories in two dimensions. Apart from arising in various physical applications, ranging from statistical mechanics to string theory, conformal field theory is a class of quantum field theories that is interesting on its own. First of all there is a large amount of symmetries. In addition, many of the interesting theories satisfy a finiteness condition, that together with the symmetries allows for a fully non-perturbative treatment, and even for a complete solution in a mathematically rigorous manner. One of the crucial tools which make such a treatment possible is provided by category theory. This thesis contains results relevant for two different classes of conformal field theory. We partly treat rational conformal field theory, but also derive results that aim at a better understanding of logarithmic conformal field theory. For rational conformal field theory, we generalize the proof that the construction of correlators, via three-dimensional topological field theory, satisfies the consistency conditions to oriented world sheets with defect lines. We also derive a classifying algebra for defects. This is a semisimple commutative associative algebra over the complex numbers whose one-dimensional representations are in bijection with the topological defect lines of the theory. Then we relax the semisimplicity condition of rational conformal field theory and consider a larger class of categories, containing non-semisimple ones, that is relevant for logarithmic conformal field theory. We obtain, for any finite-dimensional factorizable ribbon Hopf algebra H, a family of symmetric commutative Frobenius algebras in the category of bimodules over H. For any such Frobenius algebra, which can be constructed as a coend, we associate to any Riemann surface a morphism in the bimodule category. We prove that this morphism is invariant under a projective action of the mapping class group ofthe Riemann surface. This suggests to regard these morphisms as candidates for correlators of bulk fields of a full conformal field theories whose chiral data are described by the category of left-modules over H.

We introduce the formalism of categorical symmetries, and examine how these appear in quantum field theories. We discuss rational conformal field theories and their Verlinde lines, with the critical Ising model as an example. We introduce Wess Zumino Witten models and affine Lie algebras. An algorithm for the fusion rules is presented. We use bosonization to realise two dimensional adjoint SU(N) QCD as a WZW coset model plus a kinetic term for the gauge field. We argue that the infrared theory has degenerate vacua acted upon by a non-negative integer valued matrix representation of a categorical symmetry. We compute generators for these matrices for gauge groups SU(3) and SU(4).