Anne Taylor is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Yale University and an incoming Assistant Professor of Sociology at Mount Holyoke College. Inspired by her time as a group facilitator and political organizer, Taylor’s work focuses on the meaningful ways people create joy and belonging in life, including how they overcome structural and symbolic obstacles to do so. As a cultural sociologist and theorist, her research interests include Theory, Culture, Religion, and Performance Studies in presidential politics, media fandoms, sports, and travel. She earned a B.A. in History (cum laude) from Gordon College in Massachusetts, a second B.A. in Sociology (summa cum laude) from the University of Colorado-Boulder, and a M.A. and M.Phil. in Sociology from Yale University.

Taylor is currently working on her first book project entitled A Cosmopolitan Revelation: From Tourism to Pilgrimage with Rick Steves’ Europe about American travel writer and longtime PBS television host Rick Steves, and the ways in which his prescriptive philosophy of “travel as a political act” eclipses consumptive tourist practices to serve as a moralizing and sacralizing force for travelers and guides alike. She has published peer-reviewed articles in Cultural Sociology, Material Religion, American Journal of Cultural Sociology, and Sociologica, and popular essays in The Hedgehog Review and The New School’s Public Seminar. In 2023, her article “Audience Agency in Social Performance,” won the British Sociological Association’s SAGE Prize for Innovation and Excellence. She has been a Junior Fellow at the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology since 2017.

Taylor will received her Ph.D. from Yale University in May 2025, and will begin teaching as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Sociology & Anthropology department at Mount Holyoke College in August.