Anne Taylor is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Yale University. Originally from Boulder, Colorado, she holds a B.A. in History from Gordon College (Wenham, MA) and a second B.A. (summa cum laude) in Sociology from the University of Colorado - Boulder. From an early age, Anne’s creative and intellectual life was motivated by storytelling across multiple formats - videography, musical theater, creative writing, and history. While in college, Anne worked for her local and school newspaper as a columnist and after graduation continued to publish her creative writing in print and online magazines. She carried this love for story into her work as a group facilitator and sales leader at Apple and as a field organizer for Bernie 2016.

Since 2017, Anne has been a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology and a Junior Fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University. As a cultural sociologist, her work examines the intersections of religion, media, and politics to explore the ways in which people find joy and belonging in life—including how they overcome structural and symbolic obstacles to do so. Inspired by her work as an educator and political organizer, Anne is interested in capturing the lived realities of people whose political, religious, or cultural lives do not fit within existing sociological constructs. This includes theorizing the interpretive agency of the audience in social performance, expanding definitions of religion, and developing new methodological approaches. In an award-winning paper published in Cultural Sociology (2022), Anne developed a theory of audience agency in the cultural pragmatics tradition of social performance theory via an illustration of Bernie Sanders’ political movement. A second paper published in the American Journal of Cultural Sociology (2024), builds off of the first to articulate how audiences wrest interpretative authority away from actors through a case study of a Harry Potter podcast community’s changing relationship with J.K. Rowling. Anne has also published peer-reviewed empirical research on guided group travel in Europe in Material Religion (2024). Via multi-method qualitative research on travel writer Rick Steves, she uses performance theory and conceptualizations of secular religion to demonstrate how travel is not only a consumptive practice but a project of moral formation. Together, these three papers developing performance theory formed her dissertation.

In her current book project, Performing Religion: Charisma, Enchantment, and the Sacred in a Post-Secular Age, Anne theorizes the blurring the lines between “religion” and the “secular” to capture the interpretive agency of audiences, and how religious, or religious-like, communities in media, travel, and sport form, grow, and disband around shared meaning and rituals. Drawing on cultural theory and critical secularism studies, she demonstrates that modern racial-imperial projects rendered the concepts of “charisma,” “enchantment” and the “sacred” symbols for irrationality in a world fixated on progress—dooming studies that operationalize them to replicate these errors and miss the ways people synthesize beliefs. Using social performance theory to capture contingencies and variability in social action, Anne redefines these terms as connected, iterative conditions of “performances of religion,” wherein discursive structures of the sacred are staged and put into motion within boundaries of social power by actors who become vessels of charisma and audiences whose aesthetic engagement catalyzes enchantment. Via ethnography, interviews, and media analysis, she studies three cases of religion in popular culture: a podcast hosted by atheist “humanist chaplains” who teach listeners to read Harry Potter as a “sacred” text, NFL Hall of Famer Deion “Coach Prime” Sanders’ performance of charismatic self-possession as head coach of University of Colorado football, and how performances of civil religion inside the material culture of Scotland result in enchantment for groups traveling with Rick Steves’ Europe.