Dr. Anne Taylor

Anne Taylor, Ph.D. is an 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 her M.A., M.Phil., and PhD in Sociology from Yale University.

Dr. Taylor is currently working on two interrelated theoretical book projects: her first solo-authored book, Audience Agency in Social Performance, which maps the power of the audience in meaningfully shaping social life, as well as a co-authored book about the development of cultural sociological theory with Jeffrey C. Alexander. In Audience Agency, Taylor builds on her previous work articulating the interpretive agency of audiences within the cultural pragmatics paradigm, and uses examples from history and contemporary pop culture to theorize analytic elements such as the script, mise-en-scène, or means of symbolic production - all from the perspective of the audience. She is also working on several academic articles that build bridges between cultural sociological theory and the study of religion, including topics such as settler secularism and charisma.

Taylor’s empirical interests circulate around questions of moral formation, solidarity, and representations of belonging. She is currently in the research phase for her second major project, a book 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. This is part of a larger research agenda, both theoretical and empirical, that charts a path towards a sociology of joy.

Dr. Taylor 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 is a Faculty Fellow at the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology, and a Fellow at the Center for Media, Religion, and Culture at the University of Colorado-Boulder.